Here is an interesting item from Greg Sargent:
Girding for the final push on health care, the Senate Dem leadership is distributing a new polling memo that pushes back hard on claims about the reform bill’s unpopularity, insisting that public polling is inadequate and doesn’t reflect the popularity of the bill’s individual provisions.The polling memo by Dem pollster Mark Mellman, which is being pushed around to Dem Senators, argues that much polling has failed to give respondents any sense of what’s actually in the Dem proposal, simply asking voters whether they back “healthcare proposals being discussed in Congress.”
Greg also has a nice roundup of “by-the-way” items about health care doings in Congress.
Via Jed Lewison at Daily Kos, who comments on both Mellman’s poll and the Quinnipiac poll just out:
Although the Q-poll and Mellman’s analysis may seem to be at odds, they really aren’t. The Q-poll reflects general attitudes of the public, which — whether we like or not, whether they are right or wrong — are not supportive of the reform plan. Mellman’s analysis illustrates that the benefits of reform are (not surprisingly) popular. It stands to reason that a poll on the costs of reform would show that they are unpopular.
It would be a mistake for Democrats to look at the “benefits” polling analysis and assume that because the benefits are popular, their political mission has been accomplished. Instead, they should figure out why there is a gap between general attitudes on the bill as a whole and attitudes towards the bill’s individual benefits.
Likely, what Democrats will find is that there is a combination of concern that the costs of the bill will outweigh the benefits as well as skepticism that the benefits will actually come to pass. Although I personally share Paul Krugman’s view that the the benefits outweigh the costs, after years of getting the shaft, it’s understandable that large sections of the public aren’t as sanguine.
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