Public Opinion and the ACA, Individual Level Edition
By NPR released a new poll this morning of LVs concerning attitudes towards the ACA and the USSC decision. Briefly, a) there’s not much new here, and b) most of the interesting stuff is within the MoE anyway. What these new data do reiterate is that support for both the ACA itself and the Supreme Court decision are heavily mediated by pre-existing partisanship, as highlighted by my post a couple weeks ago on state level support for the ACA (which I’m going to follow up on soon as I’ve added several new variables to that little dataset).
The meat of this survey is in their (small) oversampling of the “battleground” states: CO, FL, IA, MI, NV, NH, NC, OH, PA, VA, and WI (notably, all went for Obama in 2008). Respondents from these states are marginally yet consistently more critical of both the incumbent and the ACA. The only item where battleground respondents are more likely than the general population to take the “Democratic” position is ‘ok, let’s accept the Supreme Court decision and move on to focus on the economy etc.’ (page 12) by 53%-44%. For comparison, BG respondents disapprove of the ACA 39% – 52%, whereas the general population is 43% – 48%. One would think that this might extend to Obama’s chances in these states in November.
Yet, the tendency of BG respondents to be more opposed to the ACA and the incumbent is not reflected in current polling in those states. In only two does Nate Silver’s forecasting model predict less than a 60% probability of an Obama victory (Romney is predicted to win both Florida at 50.7% and North Carolina at 70.4%). Both Silver and electoral-vote.com running polling averages range from marginally to rather significantly in favor of the incumbent, with only E-V’s FL (-1%), NC (-1%) and 538’s NC (-0.6%) even slightly in the Republican column. It’s difficult to draw any substantive conclusions from this as the ACA might be a choice determinant at the margins with certain subsets of the potential electorate. However, given that the BG states are predisposed (according to these data) to consider the ACA and the incumbent more critically, that Obama would likely win (at least) ten of these 12 states if the election were held today, this offers a conservative test of the hypothesis that the ACA is not going to swing the election. As I discussed in my state level post on this issue, the ACA is interpreted through the prism of partisanship, as is the incumbent himself.
Perhaps the most interesting finding from this survey, at least most likely to induce a chuckle, is the response to this question (page 9):
Does the fact that the Supreme Court said the health care law is constitutional make you more likely to support the law, less likely to support the law, or does the Supreme Court decision have no effect on your support for the law?
Overall, 21% are more likely to support the ACA, 16% less likely, and it makes no difference to 58% (again, supporting the hypothesis that it’s all about pre-existing partisanship). BG voters are a near exact replication of the overall sample (21/17/58). However, when limited to Republican respondents, the numbers are 8/30/56.
30% of Republican respondents are less likely to support the ACA because the Republican led Supreme Court ruled it constitutional. One might excuse the 6% of Democrats believing this, but Republicans?
