I still think a substantive health care deal is more likely than not. But boy, are these poll numbers from the New York Times/CBS unpromising. Opinion on little things like whether the government should guarantee health care for everyone has moved against the Democrats. But what's really remarkable is the people saying that they're worried about their own health insurance--it's actually improved slightly. I never would have guessed that three months of talking about recission would improve peoples' opinions of the insurance industry.
Liberal analysts are saying that opinion appears to be frozen, but I don't think that's quite true. As I've said before, vague things poll better than specific things. And the Democratic plans are not yet fully specific. Once they are, they will have a price tag and other definite drawbacks that the Republicans can talk up, while the Democrats have already fired all their best ammo.
I still think the Democrats will do it. But only if they move quickly. If it stretches beyond early November, I'd put the odds at less than 25%, unless they manage some surprise upset in the elections they look set to lose.
Copyright © 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Megan,
Can you define "substantative health care deal."
Would such a deal include:
* Public Option
* Mandatory Health Insurance
* $500 million Medicare benefit cuts
My feeling is that none of those options would poll well (and thus, they won't be polled at all) and half a billion dollars worth of cuts to senior voters' Medicare benefits will result in a Republican takeover of the House in 2010.
...and half a billion dollars worth of cuts to senior voters' Medicare benefits
Where are you getting your figures? The proposed Medicare Advantage cuts are well in excess of $10 billion annually.
I think this provision is likely to be a hard sell, too. I'm guessing the compromise will be no new sign-ups at the current, higher reimbursement rates, but no cutoffs of existing members. The public option compromise will be a trigger -- probably not taking effect until 2014 or so at the earliest. Mandatory health insurance, though, is realistically a deal breaker; the program doesn't work without it. But this aspect will either have more lavish subsidies than the Baucus bill OR a rather gaping hardship opt out. No way Democrats are stupid enough to send punishing health insurance invoices to millions of voters who otherwise might vote for them.
* $500 million Medicare benefit cuts
That can't be right - $500 million is what Medicare spends every 10 hours.
Yea, meant trillion.
$500 trillion is roughly the value of everything the humanity has produced, ever. You meant billion.
And if there's one thing we know the fiscally responsible, deficit hawk Republicans who keep going on and on about how we can't afford any government programs will support, it's the boondoggle of Medicare Advantage, which is absurdly wasteful and a massive boon to the prescription drug industry.
Seriously, just one actual fiscal conservative tell me why they would possibly support Medicare Advantage as is. It's completely obvious they're supporting it entirely because seniors are a large voting block who gets angry whenever their benefits are cut, no matter how incredibly wasteful or inefficient those benefits may be distributed. It's hypocrisy at its very worst.
Adam: the bad faith of soi-disant deficit hawk conservatives is a given by now. Pretty much a law of physics. No need to even mention it.
Not entirely true. The ones who don't run for office are quite sincere about it.
I remember when Democrats were claiming to be deficit hawks...then they gained control of the Federal government.
Pop quiz: which party attempted to amend the Constitution in the 1990s to require balanced budgets?
Republicans don't run anything.
Democrats control the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The question is: Will Democrats cut medicare by half a trillion dollars, or not.
It's irrelevant what Republicans think since Republicans have no power in the country today.
This is all about what Democrats are going to do, or not do.
Watch the Finance markup - they're offering amendment after amendment after amendment to prevent any cuts in Medicare Advantage whatsoever, or any effort to eliminate wasteful or inefficient spending, or any effort to rein in the prices paid by Medicare Advantage, even to the level Medicare currently uses.
So while it may be irrelevant what Republicans want to do now, I don't consider it irrelevant to my future voting decisions to think about what they policies they might seek to enact if they ever get power back. And what they want to do now seems to be the best indication of that.
You Dems are a bit incoherent on this. Didn't you promise there wouldn't be rationing, or cuts to people's current plans?
Unpromising?
Approval of Obama's handling of HCR reform is up 7 points from last month. 55% think health care would be better if his ideas for reform are adopted. When asked who had better ideas for HCR, people chose Obama (52%) over Republicans (27%) by a rather wide margin. 60% said he is trying to be bipartisan while only 30% think republicans are trying and 64% believe republicans are opposing it for purely political reasons. And, finally, 65% of those polled believe we should have a public option - up 5 points from a month ago.
These are not super-majority numbers, but I would say the momentum has clearly shifted in democrats' direction.
Why aren't they voting, then?
It appears you skimmed three or four paragraphs without reading them or the rest of the release. The 55% number you are referencing (p2) was people who think that Obama is overpromising compared to what will be delivered. Yes, he is up 7% month-over-month, but only because a trendline of gradually increased support dipped sharply in the previous month before rebounding, and the trendline of the opposition has been increasing with a steeper slope (p1).
Meanwhile, roughly 2/3 of the respondants indicated that either the healthcare reform proposals have not been explained clearly or else they don't understand them, and roughly 2/3 again believe that both the Democrats AND the Republicans are in this game for political reasons rather than the good of the country (p3).
The document just keeps going like that, the TLDR of which is:
1) Obama gives warm, fuzzy speeches!
2) The Republican minority is flailing because they can't give good speeches.
3) Congress sucks, bipartisan.
4) Nobody among John Q. Public has a clue what is being proposed.
If it makes you feel better to believe this, then fine. As pointed out by Ed Morrissey and Tom Maguire, the partisan split on this poll is a joke.
"The party split in the sample has Republicans at 22%, Democrats at 37%, and independents at 33%. That would make sense — if Barack Obama had won the presidential election by 20 points last November. Since Obama won by seven points, with strong support from independents and some crossover Republicans, the notion of a 15-point gap in party affiliation was ludicrous then, and is even more ludicrous now. Their July sample had a 14-point gap, which means the pollsters must feel that Democrats have gained ground over the last two months."
Doing their best to make the picture look better than it is, and you're buying it.
"My feeling is that none of those options would poll well (and thus, they won't be polled at all)"
My feeling is that you didn't, you know, actually read the poll. The public option gets 65% support vs 26% opposition, something Megan conveniently forgot to mention. Even the specific, less popular provisions like universal mandates (50-43) and the HR 3200 health care tax on upper incomes (55-37) are higher than I expected, and certainly not on the verge of collapse. Only 19% think the health care system just needs minor changes. 59% think providing universal coverage is more important than keeping costs down (35%). 64% think Republicans are opposing the current effort out of politican reasons, not because they think it's actually bad.
It's funny how Megan doesn't mention any of these numbers and cherry picks the two questions that let her grasp at straws to support her concern trolling that health care is on the verge of failure and Democrats are on the way to losing the House. Any neutral observer would consider this poll on average very good news for health care's passage.
Of course, health care reform without a public option is 38-40, one of the very few health care ideas that doesn't get majority support. The chances of losing the House go significantly up if the public option isn't included, as I'm sure Republicans well know.
Sorry, "political" reasons. I should preview more.
My feeling is that you didn't, you know, actually read the poll.
Sure I did. Here's the most important part of this poll:
Total Republicans Polled: 289 (22%)
Total Democrats Polled: 357 (37%)
Since this poll is rigged in this way, its results are meaningless to strategists.
Real politicians (Blue Dogs, for example) who have to run for re-election, don't delude themselves with these sorts of dumb polls.
I'm thinking that the reason for the party split is that people are embarrassed to associate themselves with the Republican Party.
You specifically said that stuff like the public option and mandates "won't be polled at all". Not only were they in this poll, they're in virtually every poll regarding health care. That shows to me a deep ignorance.
As for the party numbers, it looks to me like they accidentally switched the unweighted and weighted columns in the report. Yes, they got a 37-22 ratio from their respondents, and then weighted them to the numbers they used for the final results (34-28). Weighting is a standard polling practice, since it's really wasteful to keep calling groups of 1000 people until you get the correct amount of every demographic group. The 34-28 weighting is in line with the vast majority of polls - most show around 5% more Democrats than Republicans in the country. If you're going to discount the poll based on that weighting, then you're essentially discounting every mainstream poll and believing what you want to believe regardless of evidence. The CBS/NYT polls are considered among the better ones out there and have generally been fairly accurate.
(Oh, and let's not forget the Republicans in this poll still approve of the public option, 47-44. It's amazing what you find out when you talk to actual voters instead of politicians and talking heads.)
Regarding weighted vs unweighted results- for the NYT poll:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/us/25mbox.html?_r=2
"The combined results have been weighted to adjust for variation in the sample relating to geographic region, sex, race, Hispanic origin, marital status, age and education. In addition, the land line respondents were weighted to take account of household size and number of telephone lines into the residence, while the cellphone respondents were weighted according to whether they were reachable only by cellphone or also by land line."
Well, they did weight it alright - but not in a way I find satisfactory.
What part of that don't you find satisfactory? The demographic weighting is a standard poll practice, to the point where polls that don't do that are immediately suspect.
As for the land line/cellphone thing, that was a big issue last year: traditional polls only contacted land lines, and cellphone-only households tend to skew younger/more liberal (younger respondents with a land line, however, skew more conservative, due to a higher chance they're married). So what good polls do now is either call cell phones as well, which is more expensive, or weight to try to compensate for the cell phone factor. It looks like this one did both. I can't find anything to complain about.
If the purpose of this poll is to get a valid sample after weighting, perhaps using "Who you voted for in the last election" might be at least one of the metrics.
The NYT did collect the voting data, but chose not to use it.
Would you trust a poll that used respondents who voted for Obama over McCain by 51% to 38% without weighting for that question or party affiliation?
Sure I did. Here's the most important part of this poll:
Total Republicans Polled: 289 (22%)
Total Democrats Polled: 357 (37%)
It's actually worse than that. They re-weighted from 289 GOP down to 234, and weighted Dems up from 357 to 385.
They took a sample that already favored Dems 358-289, and re-weighted a quarter of the Republicans out of it. Mind-boggling.
Do you think you would still get 65% for a public option if it were pointed out that Medicare is facing a $37 trillion deficit? The problem with this poll is two fold. First, it is an "all adult" poll with no attempt to see if the respondent is even registered to vote. Second, there are no dollars attached. Are you going to argue that the 65% would hold if it were actually going to cost those 65% real money? I suspect not.
Unlike you, the Democrats understand how soft the 65% is.
Rick
While I'm sure the $37 trillion in unfunded Medicare liabilities would scare random people in a poll and probably lower support a few points for anything it was put in a question with, I'm not sure what the connection is. The public option isn't set up like Medicare (though I certainly wish it were), and after the initial subsidies it's required to pay for itself through the premiums it takes in. I don't see how the merits of the public option have anything to do with Medicare's debts, unless you're just trying to push a "government can't do anything right" line. Which would make for a fairly biased poll.
If there were dollars attached, however, you could certainly use yesterday's CBO score, which says that the HR 3200 version of the public option saves $110 billion. I'm willing to bet that 65% would stick around if you used the actual numbers involved, instead of some scare numbers for an unrelated program.
As for the "all adult" issue, you're correct. Polls of all adults generally are several points more Democratic than polls of registered voters, which themselves are more Democratic than polls of likely voters. I didn't see any indication which type this poll was, though. Could you point me to a specific spot in Megan's link where I can double-check that? I don't recall them running all adult polls before, so that would be odd.
I agree with Rick,
IMHO, the "all adult" vs likely voter split is going to be a very large factor in the 2010 elections.
25% of the respondents to this poll did not vote in 2008. In all likely hood, these people are not going to show up and vote in an off year election (2010).
While the republicans can slow down the process - they really have no power to control anything right now.
The swing voters in the House are the right leaning democrats (the Blue Dogs) who know they received a big push from independents in 2008 and they are concerned about losing that support.
This poll glosses over those details and loses informational value as a result.
For Adam, "Could you point me to a specific spot in Megan's link where I can double-check that? I don't recall them running all adult polls before, so that would be odd."
By "them" I assume you mean the NYT. From their discussion of the poll:
"The sample of land line telephone exchanges called was randomly selected by a computer from a complete list of more than 69,000 active residential exchanges across the country."
Sounds kinda like an "all adult poll" to me.
To further the thought ...
I refer you to near the top of page 23 of the poll results. While the question does not ask if the respondent is registered, it does ask who you voted for in the last election. 25% said they did not vote and additional 2% replied DK/NA which I think means declined or not applicable.
Adam,
The problem with the public option number is that different people have different understandings of what the public option would look like -- which is reflected in the 59% who say they don't understand current health care proposals.
A public option is popular unless:
1) people could be dumped onto it involuntarily, losing their private insurance
2) it costs a trillion dollars
3) it involves massive cuts to Medicare
Add those caveats in and support plummets.
Also, some of the questions have vague answers than don't necessarily mean support where you seem to assuming it. Lots of us libertarians would like to see "fundamental change" in health care -- but believe me, our solution looks radically different from yours.
Right. And rather than calculating out the supermarjority, I think a helpful exercise is figuring out which Democrats will join a filibuster. My sense is Republican Olympia Snowe clearly won't join a filibuster, and I bet Susan Collins won't, either.
By my count that means the GOP needs three Democrats willing to join a filibuster. I have no doubt they'll find MORE than three Democrats who will vote against the bill itself on a floor vote (but the Dems can afford up to ten defections at that point), but are there really three who are willing to buck their party and their president and not even allow a vote at all? Just seems implausible. After all, a Blanche Lincoln or a Ben Nelson can get ample credit from voters back home for fighting death panels and socialism simply by being on record for casting a vote against the legislation. There's no need to get all crazy and join a filibuster for that.
My reading of the tea leaves says that for the initial Senate cloture vote, it will be very difficult to get Collins. I'm predicting 60-40 on the nose, with Snowe and Lincoln crossing over (based mostly on how they've been acting in the Finance markup). Senate passage will probably have Landrieu and Nelson voting no as well, but the conference report will perhaps have Collins and Voinovich switching (if there's no public option, or just a trigger) since there's no more procedural games to be played at that point.
My reading of the tea leaves says that for the initial Senate cloture vote, it will be very difficult to get Collins
Maybe. I know Olympia Snow is VERY popular in Maine. But Collins, I thought, considerably less so. Maine's getting very blue. The safer course of action for her would be to avoid at all costs being singled out as one of the principle reasons healthcare didn't pass, which is what will happen (it's true that the average voter doesn't follow legislative procedure all that closely, but progressives in Maine will be sure EVERYBODY is aware of her role if indeed she helps kill reform) if the bill dies because of a filibuster she joined...
So, if you're reckoning is correct, then I'd wager it will happen only if if it's not the deciding vote. If the bill needs Collins's vote to end debate, I strongly suspect she'll support cloture (and then vote against the final package if she chooses). Just seems the safer course of action.
Oh. Just re-read your post. You're saying we get Collins and lose Lincoln on cloture. Got it. Very plausible. You sound like an inside the beltway'er.
Don't be so sure. They appear to be repeatedly stepping on Snowe's toes in mark-up, on transparency and other issues. Plus, the issue of these reforms causing havoc in Maine's insurance market already is something mighty important to consider.
I guess in a 20-page report everyone is going to see the stats that confirm some of their predispositions. You see numbers moving against the Democrats, but support for a "government administered health insurance plan" has increased to 65%, and more people than not said they would oppose changes that do not include a public option. Republicans even support it 47-42%.
Wow, manic depressive anyone?
And as a corollary, can I now assume that since the Democrats more likely to fail horrifically on health care, they are now less likely to lose the house in 2010?
Damn -- my "depressive" link was supposed to go here.
Sigh: here.
No, No, No. This attitude that something will pass is defeatist and self-fulfilling. A very good friend of mine whose team was in DC on 9/10-9/12 and visiting Senate offices said that staffers on the Democrat side are wringing their hands in terror thinking their boss is going to be replaced. A perfectly good strategy for defeating healthcare exists, and centers around keeping the Republicans together as a block and pressuring them to make an issue of Senator Jim Demint's amendments. This would force Democrats into a very defensive and rather uncomfortable posture. http://tinyurl.com/n7jl3m
I don't know how many times this has been send out from many of us working this angle, only to have it ignored. It is almost as if everyone who can assist in making this an issue has this attitude of "not invented here". A very good friend of mine once told me of a quote by Ronald Reagan. Live by this quote: "There is nothing that cannot be accomplished if one does not worry about who gets the credit".
As a liberal who'd like to see reconciliation used, I honestly think it's fairly unlikely that it will be. Your whole premise for defeating health care (and that in your link) pretty much starts with the assumption that we're under reconciliation. I think the odds of a bill going to the Senate floor with Snowe's trigger and getting 60 votes for cloture are pretty high right now, and if they can pass cloture they can overcome any point of order votes as well.
But say there aren't 60, and we're going to reconciliation. The big problem with your plan is that, as the post makes clear, none of DeMint's amendments are *actually in the resolution*. They were stripped in conference because Pelosi rightly recognized them for the poison pills they were that would render reconciliation an unusable strategy. So your whole strategy is this:
"We should be arguing that the Senate should abide by the rule it adopted for itself anyway because it should still be in the resolution and would be in the resolution if the Democrats hadn’t played games and the Republicans hadn’t slept through them."
Your whole plan for defeating health care is to argue that the Senate should abide by a rule that isn't in the resolution. That Democrats should just...be nice, and act as if the poison pill was still there even though it isn't. I mean, Harry Reid's pretty spineless, but for him to give away the trump card of reconciliation by willingly setting a 60 vote requirement for a point of order that isn't actually in the resolution they're operating by seems to me to be extremely unlikely.
So, no, Republicans don't have the rules on their side. The rules as currently written allow reconciliation and don't allow DeMint's points of order, and if they didn't, 51 Democrats could change the rules anyway. All the Republicans have is the ability to scream very loudly, which they're very good at. And I'm sure they will.
Adam - "As a liberal who'd like to see reconciliation used..."
Are you really sure about that? Simple majority rules might not look so liberal in a couple of years.
I recently posted this at chez Althouse:
Ok, one more observation from the NY Times poll:
(from near the top of page 23, data pivoted again)
"Who did you vote for in 2008 ..."
Obama 38
McCain 28
Someone else 4
Won't say 4
Didn't vote 25
DK/NA 2
So out of a total of 101 samples (I'm guessing these numbers are all times ten since the poll states that they contacted 1,042 people?) - there were 74 people who voted in the last election in their poll. This gives the following percentage by candidate:
Obama 51.3%
McCain 38%
Someone else 5%
Won't say 5%
Does this seem correct?
Are you looking at the same poll I am? The one Megan linked has only 20 pages, and "2008" isn't found anywhere in it.
Anyway, "who did you vote for questions" are notoriously inaccurate. A lot of polls last year had only 35-40% of people saying they voted for Bush in 2004. It seems some percentage of people either aren't comfortable saying who they voted for, or wish they would have voted differently and so pick the someone else or won't say options.
You are right.
The report is a joint CBS/NYT times poll.
Megan linked to the CBS version.
As I stated, this is a re-post from me over at http://althouse.blogspot.com/
which covers the same poll but refers to the NYT write-up which is available here:
http://documents.nytimes.com/new-york-times-cbs-news-poll-confusion-over-health-care-tepid-support-for-war#p=10
Sorry for the confusion.
Although it's obviously in the interest of pro-reformers to get a bill to Obama's desk as quickly as possible, I think the issue of the November elections has been hyped up a bit -- especially over the last couple of days. And that's because it's been obvious for many months now that Democrats are likely facing a punishing midterm election in 2010. Those expectations have already been figured into the odds. I mean, people in Congress have pollsters and analysts at their disposal. If it's one thing they know how to do it is cast votes with an eye toward reelection. Evidently a good number of Democrats, at least, figure they're better off in November of 2010 if they get something passed. And the really vulnerable Dems will get a free pass by Pelosi (and Reid) as they have sufficient numbers to absorb defections. The critical hurtle is getting the votes for cloture. Doing that will allow the Dems in the Senate to give their seven or eight most conservative members the freedom to cast a public vote against reform, if they so choose.
Anwyay, I think a big reason for the more auspicious chances of passage is GOP overreach. In broad swathes of America (no, not very much in the reddest corners of America, but those GOP redoubts are beyond reach for Dems, anyway), the Republican brand is now associated with crazies who draw Hitler mustaches and scream about killing grandma and African birth certificates. This makes voting for healthcare easier to portray as mainstream, and reasonable.
In short, we'll look back at this in a few months and conclude the GOP got punked by the cool and rational Barack Obama.
" In broad swathes of America (no, not very much in the reddest corners of America, but those GOP redoubts are beyond reach for Dems, anyway), the Republican brand is now associated with crazies who draw Hitler mustaches and scream about killing grandma and African birth certificates."
Huh? Republicans are not popular by any means, but they've closed the gap on the generic ballot in multiple polls considerably, to levels not seen in years. By your rationale, they should be getting worse, not better. Telling fairy tales about general opinions on Republicans does not strengthen your position.
Are those generic polls broken out by region? Because all indications otherwise are that the GOP hasn't closed the gap at all in the Niortest or the Midwest, and has made only modest gains in the West. Which would indicate that, yes, the South (including the border South) will elect a lot of Republicans to Congress next year, and probably turn out those of its Democrats who aren't in reliably safe districts. But elsewhere in the country there just isn't any kind of GOP wave building at all: in fact the Democrats could even make small gains. Increasingly the Republicans are becoming the Southern Party (with a smaller franchise in the Mormon lands). Until the GOP starts gaining again outside its two bastions of strength I don't see any Republican return to power on the horizon. The South and Utah/Wyoming/Idaho only have so many congressmen they can elect.
Gee. Black people make up roughly 6% of the population. But according to this person, if blacks don't make up roughly half the people polled, it must be 'rigged'. Is this movietyper guy anyone we already know by another handle who has also shown a certain deficiency when it comes to manipulating numbers? Basic Fact, say, or Mixner?
Oh geez. More from Morrissey on this silly poll:
"However, the NYT/CBS polling a week before the election — when they were trying to pick the results as closely as possible to bolster their credibility — showed a seven point gap between Democrats and Republicans, 30/37/27, respectively. It seems that the NYT/CBS pollsters know how to find a reliable, predictive sample when it suits their purposes, and how to avoid one as well."
I'm no braniac, but even I can see this poll is purposefully weighted to produce a better-looking result.
I'm no braniac, but even I can see this poll is purposefully weighted to produce a better-looking result."
And it would pay to remember who bought the poll: CBS and the New York Times.
Neither one of these media outlets are unbiased in their desire to enact socialist-style health care in the United States.
This poll is a really transparent attempt at the media to produce a poll which allows them to write stories that suggest that Americans are for Obama's health care reform.
They are not; as evidenced by the actual (not weighted polled) voters who showed up in August to town hall meetings and the hundreds of thousands that marched on Washington.
CBS and the NY Times are cocooning. They're producing rigged polls to fake out some Rather stupid Congressmen who might fall for it without checking the internals. But of course, with an election coming up and the environment this heated, all politicians are looking at the internals and discounting push poll results of adults used by the machine for propoganda purposes.
Real politicians poll internally, and want it done professionally (and they're aware that public polling is rigged by each side).
Congress knows the American public doesn't want this. All the internal polls show it and it's why Congress hasn't enacted President Obama's health care reform.
Probably not far off here -- Pew polling finds major media heavily Dem going back decades.
Alinsky Says: When you can't attack the message, attack the messenger.
Black persons make up 12.8% of the population of the United States. Get your facts straight before you attack or you look like a maroon.
Cite: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S PROPOSED HEALTH CARE CHANGES
Mostly support 30%
Mostly oppose 23
Don’t know enough 46
46% of those polled, including 52% of independents, don't know enough to know whether they support or oppose President Obama's proposals. That's after a summer of arguing about it, a televised address to a joint session of Congress, etc. Doesn't sound to me like the sale has been closed. The question is whether the Democrats feel safe pushing through a massive overhaul of our health care system without Republican cover when 69% of the public is at best non-commital.
I suggest you look at what Keith Hennessey, a much more honest and objective republican who opposes health care reform as much as our good host has to say about the odds of passage after reading the recent polls.
http://keithhennessey.com/2009/09/25/updated-scenarios-2/
It's even worse if you consider how much they skewed the sample toward Obama:
The sample has Republicans at 22%, Democrats at 37%, and Independents at 33%.
http://documents.nytimes.com/new-york-times-cbs-news-poll-confusion-over-health-care-tepid-support-for-war#p=24
You'd have to chop about 10 percentage points from every pro-Obama position in the poll to get an accurate read of the electorate.
Rasmussen has a solid track record and has the country at about +5 GOP right now for likely voters.
This kind of weighting is sort of funny when you think about it. The more the public moves away from Dem positions, the more they won't identify as Dems. But if you keep re-weighting back to where they did identify as Dems, you would expect to keep getting the same results -- only your weightings would change.
Re: Rasmussen has a solid track record and has the country at about +5 GOP right now for likely voters.
You mean the poll that showed Obama with just a razor-thin margin in Pennsylavania, a state he won by double digits?
If you want accuracy in polling the best thing to do is to check out the poll averagings. This smooths out occasional outlier and usually comes within a margin or error of predicting election results.
If you want accuracy in polling, the best thing to do is to vote.
And the Democrat-controlled Congress isn't voting.
They don't need a single Republican to pass Obama's health care reform.
Here's my question: If everybody in the country wants this so badly, then why are Democrats not voting?
The answer is because they're not idiots. They poll internally and those polls aren't rigged to produce a result; rather they are designed to ascertain what the public wants.
And the public does not want Obama's health care reform bill to pass; the public intends to remove Democrats from office if they push this down our throats.
I love the smell of defeatism in the afternoon!
There is less than 10% anything is passed this year or next. There is, as yet, no bill. What Baucus put out can't even get the support of Democrats without vast changes. It was pretty telling that the "goal" put out was to get a bill passed in 6 weeks. Now, why do you suppose this was the goal for passage? The leadership doesn't want the elections in NJ and VA to affect the votes of moderate Democrats. There is little chance you will see a vote before then, and if the Republicans win both elections, there is zero chance you will see a vote afterwards.
That looks about right.
I think, too, the devil is in the details. The longer these bills sit out there the more people find to hate in them.
Just yesterday, two things jumped out of current proposals: jail time for those who don't buy insurance, and reducing reimbursement rates to doctors in the top ten percent of costs. The first is Orwellian, the second resembles death panels by proxy.
Gee, I guess the Pew poll is wrong too. In fact, as of July of this year, 35% of the public identify themselves as Democrats, while only 23% identify as Republicans. This is on a sample size of N=10,630.
Of course, this poll is biased and wrong, right? It has to be. Any other dim-witted objections?
Your Pew poll may well be right....in gauging American views of scientists. It says absolutely nothing about whether people identify themselves as Republican or Democrat.
P.S. Some of us actually check your links.
Megan,
Do you join Democrats in proposing that people who don't buy insurance under Obama's health reform proposals should be put in a prison camp for one year?
Is this the sort of bill that Democrats should vote for?
Obama seems prepared to let the terrorists at Guantanamo go free, but wants to put Americans in prison camps if they don't buy insurance.
How can this happen in America?
http://www.politico.com/livepulse/0909/Ensign_receives_handwritten_confirmation_.html?showall
I never would have guessed that three months of talking about recission would improve peoples' opinions of the insurance industry
Surprisingly, death panels don't poll well compared to private insurance.
You have to remember, before this summer people were promised magical healthcare ponies that would not affect their coverage, not cost them higher taxes, cover everyone not covered, and all for free! free! free!
Since then, we've found out care will be rationed according to gov't panels (and the new plan also includes reduced rates for physicians in the top ten percent of claims), Medicare Advantage will be gutted, your company will be incentivized to dump you on to the public option, this will all cost a trillion dollars, and you'll be sent to jail if you don't buy insurance.
Again Democrats are threatening to send you to a prison camp if you disagree with their health care plans.
Just like they did in 1942 when they sent millions of Americans to prison camps for nothing.
You're kidding, right? Didn't you read the thing? Or did you just look at the first few paragraphs without bothering to scroll down:
You can also see next to this nugget the embedded chart whose figures I cite.
Chuckle. Does anyone wonder why I have such a low opinion of a certain type of 'conservative'? Especially those that get caught in outright, blatant lies? It's pretty obvious that Fraggle didn't read the article, but I'm guessing that few - if any - so-called 'conservatives' are going to call him on it.
I wasn't aware that the political leanings of scientists translated directly to the public at large. But I found the "chart" you mention, three quarters of the way down the article and displayed as an image (guess Pew doesn't know how to use HTML tables). So someone reading the text of the article thinking that would have anything to do with your point might be confused.
Amazing that Republicans consistently get close to 50% of the popular vote when they are only 23% of the public.
And yet more idiocy:
Gee, that 12.8% figure totally obliterates my point about the innumeracy displayed, as we can tell by substituting it into my original post:
Wow!! I've been properly chastised. Anybody who styles themselves a 'conservative' want to step and call this gentleman on his idiocy? No? Thought not.
We also have this:
Did any of these worthies do the slightest bit of research about the current proportions of those who identify as Republicans vs those who identify as Democrats before popping off? Or are they so innumerate that they simply assumed that the uneven proportions simply meant the poll was biased?
Did any of these worthies do the slightest bit of research ...
Twice now, you have your facts wrong.
The poll was of adults ... not voters
Party weighting is only relevant to real politicians when you are polling "likely voters." Most adults don't vote and won't vote, and so their opinions are irrelevant to a politician.
Polls of "adults" are routinely scoffed at by professional politicians because they're only used as push-polls or for propaganda purposes.
SOV, a couple weeks ago:
I'm not ideological
SOV, today:
Does anyone wonder why I have such a low opinion of a certain type of 'conservative'
Tears of laughter are the only appropriate response to her posts.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Riiiiight. So if I say I'm not particularly religious(in fact, I'm agnostic), but then I go on to criticize Southern Baptists, it's just evidence that I'm lying and that I really am religious. Good one, Dave. And btw, thanks for pointing out that Fraggle was lying and that certain other people here are innumerate. You know, that whole 'take responsibility' thing that 'conservatives' are always on about.
That's the strategy number three, I guess, the "We're not talking about them, we're talking about you" ploy. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Dave doesn't soon follow this up with strategy number four "You're not the boss of me".
I'm not ideological
You know, that whole 'take responsibility' thing that 'conservatives' are always on about.
The SOV comedy tour continues...
I doubt she's bright enough to even realize she's contradicting herself.
A truly rare combination of nastiness and stupidity.
Oh, and here's a little nugget:
I'm not speaking directly about what Megan as posted, mind, I'm simply pointing out that (a)certain 'conservatives' are demonstrating a rather extreme amount of innumeracy, and (b) no other 'conservatives' are calling them on it. I guess that's why only 6% of scientists self-identify as Republican, and only 9% self-identify as conservative. Plainly this is yet another case of liberal bias in academia.
SoV left out this little tidbit. It is the last sentence of the article he quoted (without bothering to provide a link). I can see why, since it makes the whole poll smell rather fishy.
"In 10 AP-Yahoo News polls conducted from November 2007 through last fall’s election in which the same people were repeatedly interviewed, just under half stayed with the same political party the entire time."
Link
Chuckle. Unlike you and others here, I'm not dumb enough to dismiss a poll - or indeed, a whole series of polls - because the number of self-declared Republicans and Democrats are not equal. And unlike you and yours, I actually believe in taking personal responsibility.
So I'll bite: just what, precisely, is the contradiction?
I won't bother to note yet again your hypocrisy and willingness to sacrifice basic methodological procedures to further your rah-rah tribalism. I think everyone knows what you're all about by now. Nothing significant.
The weaseling there of course is the phrase 'likely voters'[1]. This is actually the toughest part of the art of polling, btw. When it comes to the statistical part, I could teach anyone what they need to know in just one semester; two if we want to extend that to sampling and design. The 'likely voter' though is high art; Zogby made his bones by calling an election based upon his model of likely voters.
That's really neither here nor there, obviously, because we're not talking about people likely to vote about their possible selected candidate, we're simply asking them whether or not they approve or disapprove of a bit of public policy. A horse of another color as it were. I just want to point out that the Rasmussen poll may not necessarily be wrong, merely that it is talking about something else entirely.
[1]People want to go with the winner. Before last November, the persons whose opinion I happened to know on the matter were running about four to one for Obama. In an amazing bit of statistical legerdemain, the people who voted for Obama were suddenly up about eight to one. And of course, we all know that at least ten million citizens were at Woodstock on the strength of their personal testimony, right? Stated party preference is a fickle and malleable thing, though it doesn't excuse the ignorance of certain posters above about the necessity of taking into account relative compositions. And it really doesn't excuse the fact that these same people won't admit that they were wrong when this was pointed out, or that others in their tribe won't cop to the fact that there's a bunch of stone weasels in their midst.
Polling of voters demonstrates that they're massively against the President's health care reform tax - and the support continues to fall the more people learn.
Rasmussen Poll: "Just 41% of voters nationwide now favor the health care reform proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats. That’s down two points from a week ago and the lowest level of support yet measured. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 56% are opposed to the plan."
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/healthcare/september_2009/health_care_reform