Handle With Care
The latest Gallup Poll shows 49% disapprove of Obama's handling of healthcare policy while 43% approve. I don't object to this sort of question, but like the poll I mentioned yesterday, this requires interpretation. One might think that a clear plurality opposes healthcare reform, but all this tells us is they don't like how the President is managing it. It could be a proxy for other things, but if I strongly supported the new healthcare bill(s), I'd certainly be unhappy with how Obama is handling it.
Incidentally, one way supporters of the current healthcare plans argue is by attacking "special interests." For example, here's the President:
...every time we come close to passing health insurance reform, the special interests fight back with everything they've got. They use their influence. They use their political allies to scare and mislead the American people. They start running ads. This is what they always do.
Pardon me? I thought the White House had already bought off the special interests this time around. The main ads I've seen have come from "special interest" groups that back the plan. The opposition seems to be coming from an angry grass roots campaign.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:27 AM
2 Comments:
You're teasing out an interesting aspect of polls: what does the questioner assume is meant by the question? I doubt that there is much problem here, since I think it likely everyone interprets the question to mean, "Do you support Obama/Obama's health efforts?"
This is mostly a matter of "everyone one knows what you really mean." On the left they call this code words.
A similar issue but different (less about politics and more about linguistics and meaning) is the literal meaning people assign to a question.
The main question here, "Do you approve or disapprove of President Obama's handling of health care policy" is a great example.
For 60 percent, the answer should be "no", or more colloquially, "huh?", which could be translated as don't know/don't care.
For the remaining 40 percent, the answer should be "yes," since pretty much everyone who pays any attention is going to approve or disapprove.
But they bastardize it right away, forcing it into a non-literal (although common enough it can be treated as literal) choice.
And even then you begin to run into the problems you mention, true liberals who believed it was an honest process would disapprove.
But even if you did it right, you'd still not have an honest poll. Most of the time people would be answering the unasked question, "Do you want to get sick?", which is pretty much meaningless to the whole program.
Why the liberal/conservative filter? that doesn't seem to advance the discussion of whether people want this particular (or even any) health care reform.
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