Oops! Right-wing push poll accidentally finds Obamacare popular

[babylonsister]

Wednesday, Aug 14, 2013 04:02 PM EST
Right-wing push poll accidentally finds Obamacare popular
Heritage's new poll oversamples Republicans and asks misleading questions -- but finds most want to keep Obamacare
By Alex Seitz-Wald


Heritage Action, the activist wing of the conservative Heritage Foundation, is out with a new poll today that’s getting some favorable coverage in the mainstream political press. According to Heritage, the survey shows that the GOP shouldn’t fear a government shutdown over Obamacare defunding. But there’s a catch.

The background here is that a group of conservative senators, including Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Marco Rubio, are trying to push Republican leaders to demand that Congress defund Obamacare in upcoming appropriations battles , even if it means forcing the government to shut down. Heritage supports the effort, so it took the poll to try to steel the spines of Republican leaders.


“Americans — including 57 percent of independents in ten critical congressional districts — favor defunding Obamacare,” said Michael Needham, the CEO of Heritage Action. “House Republicans should be much more concerned with the fallout of failing to defund Obamacare than with the imaginary fallout of doing so.”

What Needham fails to mention, however, is that even this push poll that dramatically oversamples Republicans (more on that in a minute) finds respondents are more likely to say that the Affordable Care Act should be kept than scrapped — and that a plurality would blame Republicans if the government were to shut down.

Only 44.5 percent “oppose the health care law and think it should be repealed,” while 52 percent either support the law as is or have some concerns, but say they think implementation should move forward. And asked whom they would blame if “there was an impasse between president Obama and Congress on whether to continue to fund the health care law, and that impasse resulted in a partial government shutdown,” the top response (28 percent) was Republicans in Congress. The next option, Obama, got 21 percent of respondents.

more...

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/14/right_wing_push_poll_accidentally_finds_obamacare_popular/

[JHB]

1. Speaking of Heritage Action and its CEO Michael Needham...

...he's another one of those chickenhawks who love to who love to throw throw around military imagery ("This is no time to abandon our posts&quot but spent the entire Iraq invasion and occupation in college and in Washington working for Heritage and other political jobs, despite being of prime military age.

Link to previous post on this, from just after the election and Republicans were still unskewing the pooch:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/101777714

[Benton D Struckcheon]

2. Heh.

What did they think, that no one would look at this? Fools.
It's still a longshot, but it gets a little more possible every day: self-destruction in 2014 for the GOP. Pelosi back as Speaker. Whee!

[TheKentuckian]

3. Heritage Foundation responders support Heritage Foundation proposal...shocking!

[babylonsister]

4. You didn't read this, did you. The foundation FUBARed and got

responses they didn't want.

[TheKentuckian]

16. Yeah, I read it and my statement stands.

[area51]

15. +1

I know some people on this site don't want to acknowledge the truth, but Obama & congress didn't pull this plan out of their ... It's a Gingrich/Heritage foundation plan, to force people to buy expensive, lightly regulated insurance from private, for-profit companies which have already been proven to be serial killers, and no public option was to be offered. A republican trojan horse, so to speak, that was welcomed by O & congress. This is why I call it GingrichCare; it's a completely republican construction that was called for & welcomed by Gingrich in the past.

[sheshe2]

5. The GOP'ers reek of desperation!

And the key question of the survey — would you support a government shutdown to defund Obamacare? — is comically euphemistic, calling a hypothetical shutdown a “temporary slowdown in non-essential federal government operations, which still left all essential government services running.”

And yet, despite oversampling Republicans and asking misleading questions, the poll still finds that pluralities favor keeping Obamacare and that Republicans would bear the brunt of the public’s wrath if the government shuts down.

From your link.

They can't even do a poll that favors them. Even with oversampling they can not get the answers that they want.

Poor poor GOP. They will bear the brunt of the public's wrath.

Thanks Bsister!

[Snake Plissken]

6. The GOP's mythology has lost it's edge

After thirty years of telling middle class and poor GOPers that the only way they can get rich themselves is to hand over their money to people who are already rich people ...maybe they are finally starting to wake up, and realize that getting screwed by the health care industrial complex may not be in their best interest after all

[Jack Rabbit]

7. Unlike polls that showed Obama leading Mitt the Twit last yera

. . . this Heritage Foundation poll really needs to be "unskewed."

Question for Heritage Foundation "fellows": How are you sophists and pseudo-intellectuals like having de Mint Julip as your new headmaster? Get used to this kind of thing, because this is what you're paying him to do.

[AnotherMcIntosh]

8. The RW should find Obamacare popular with RWingers. The mandatory purchase of ins was a Repub idea.

The mandate was a Republican concept.

If Candidate Obama was correct in 2008, why shouldn't there be consistency? Why shouldn't we respect the views and logic of Candidate Obama?

[pampango]

12. And yet it was Massachusetts, not Oklahoma or Mississippi that enacted the predecessor of the ACA.

Imagine that. One would expect such a "conservative" concept should be wildly popular in red states. That does not actually seem to be the case. Only the Massachusetts legislature (85% Democratic at the time and not known for their conservatism) passed it.

[SunSeeker]

9. Jim De Mint is doing a bang up job running Heritage.

Please, GOP, listen to Jim.

[Ikonoklast]

10. Heckuva Job, Minty!

They are sooooo fucked.

[VA_Jill]

11. Hoist on their own petard

LOL I love it! ES&D, Heritage!

[rocktivity]

13. "Obamacare" -- wasn't that was supposed to be a four-letter word?

rocktivity

[Cha]

14. Mahalo babylonsistah!

[soryang]

17. Administration caves in again on key ACA provisions

Everyone has heard about the delay on the employer mandate by now. But did you know that the limits on beneficiary cost sharing have been delayed till 2015? Also the prohibition on lifetime caps has been delayed according to some reports. Too bad the Obama administration doesn't like Obamacare and has caved in to corporate complainers whenever the whining gets too loud. By 2015 no doubt they'll find more reasons to let insurance companies and employers off the hook.