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What MA voters told us about the Senate health bill and change? Not enough!
By Anonymous on Wed, 01/20/2010 - 10:33pm
Last night, Democrats lost Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in a bitter special election. This is a sad day for all of us who loved Ted Kennedy. But to make it even worse, conservative Democrats and Washington talking heads are claiming that the loss happened because Congress was "too far to the left." They are wrong again and we can prove it.
- We had Research 2000 poll voters immediately after the Election ended: Even Scott Brown voters want Democrats to be bolder and they want healthcare reform that includes a public option. You read that right.
- By a margin of three-to-two, former Obama voters who voted for Republican Scott Brown said the Senate healthcare bill "doesn't go far enough."
- Six-to-one Obama voters who stayed home agreed, and to top it off
80% of all voters still want the choice of a public option in the bill.
The message is clear, there is only one way out of this mess if Democrats want to win in 2010. It's time to pass health care with 51 votes in the Senate using the budget reconciliation process. And it must include the most popular piece of bold reform: the choice of a public option.Click here to see the complete poll results.
"In an election between Scott Brown and the public option, the public option would have won," noted Charles Chamberlain, political director of Democracy for America.
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Sign the petition telling Democrats to be strong not weaker in 2010.
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Sign the petition to tell Democrats to use reconciliation to pass the Public Option.
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[size=10]The Research 2000 Massachusetts Poll was conducted for three organizations -- the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy for America, and MoveOn.org -- on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 after polls closed in the special election for Senate. 500 Obama voters who did NOT vote in the special election were asked one set of questions. 500 Obama voters who DID vote -- and voted for Republican Scott Brown -- were asked another set of questions. Each has a margin of error of 4.5%. 2774 Obama voters from 2008 who voted Tuesday were reached -- of which 2274 (82%) voted for Democrat Martha Coakley and 500 (18%) voted against her.[/size]
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Comments
Is this the right place?
I'm sympathetic to your point, and to your analysis. There's no question that Tuesday's results signaled the disaffection of voters of all dispositions - liberals discouraged by a lack of progress, conservatives appalled at the nature of proposals, and independents worried that no one was responding to the very real economic crisis we face.
But this post reads more like something I'd find on BlueMassGroup than the standard UHub fare. I'm no arbiter of appropriateness, but I have to wonder whether this site will be well served by an exchange of posts advocating particular political actions in Washington.
why...
The answers to me were very surprising because they are so different from what the TV pundits are saying. That's why I wrote the blog post.
The poll was sponsored by progressive organizations but they frame the questions only and pay for the polling service, Massachusetts voters and MA non-voters provided the answers. While I'll heard Rasmussen tracks to the right, I've never heard or read complaints about Research 2000 polling to the left. Even if it did, that doesn't delegitimize the trends.
Note that this is not an article but a blog entry posted on my Uhub blog. By the way, every registered Uhub user has one. Some of my blog posts are promoted to the front page, many are not. I use blog posts when I write opinion or link to organizations that have petition signature drives. I post an article (as opposed to a blog entry) when I'm linking to an news or opinion article written elsewhere on the internet.
That doesn't sound like conservatives and anti-health care bill voters electing Scott Brown because he'll vote no on healthcare; this sounds like liberals and independents saying Obama hasn't gone far enough.
Here's some related data. Brown got 59,253 more total votes than McCain. Coakley got 845,415 less than Obama. Turnout in traditionally republican areas seems to have been similar to the presidential election, while most of the fall-off seems to have come from traditionally democratic areas.
Wow.
Understanding why people vote for/against a candidate (or don't vote in the election) is a start. Now we'll see how politicians in Washington choose to move forward. Look at the full poll results here. They are interesting.
So far its looks like Democrats will continue to take a cautious approach to implementing health care. Personally, I think making people buy insurance from for-profit corporations is wrong unless you offer them a non-profit pubic option (which saves 110 billion over ten years btw.) And perhaps most importantly, the bill should get health insurance premium inflation under control.
DENY DENY DENY The people
DENY DENY DENY
The people don't know what they want, we will move the goal posts until it matches what we preach!
Guess what, we could have had health care reform but Democrats took on too much last year and did not move health care fast enough. Democrats did not have the guts to force an extended filibuster by the Republicans, whats the deal with these wussy filibusters that a threat of one is enough to stop you in your tracks.
So now we have a situation on our hands that could have been avoided if Ted Kennedy and the Democrats did not treat the Government like their own personal property. If Ted Kennedy RETIRED at a reasonable time then this could have happened during a normal election cycle, national republicans never would have paid attention to us. The Democrats could have left the seat alone and allowed the Governor to appoint the seat if it were not for the law taking that right away when we had a Republican Governor. We have come out of this as both too in control but not in control.
So the people killed us in MA over HCR and now your saying that they will love the public option? That is like saying if you hate brocolli your going to love asparagus!
To be a satanic advocate
Some people like stinky pee.
Polling to get the results you want
Umm... what did you think these organizations were going to say about the direction of the healthcare debate? If you think that most of America wants to follow the lead of these organizations, then I hope you are expecting Democratic Party to be back in the minority very quickly.
Research 2000 has been pretty
Research 2000 has been pretty reliable in the polling world with it's past polling on issues and candidates. They, like others, had brown gaining momentum and had it ties a few days before the race.
So whats your point?
Beat me to it
My first thought was, I have to question the results of a poll made by groups with a defined agenda. I think you would question any poll made by Fox news, the Limbaugh radio show, and the Sarah Palin Poll Service. ;-)
keep thinking that
and come november republicans will control 80% of both houses
And if so that is an even
And if so that is an even surer sign than the election of Scott Brown already was that the majority of Americans, particularly suburbanites, can not be trusted with the power of voting.
This is not supposed to be a mob rule democracy but it's certainly what it has turned into with the Tea Party and other such groups convincing suffering Americans that something that would help them suffer less instead will make them suffer more.
It still amazes me that people point to happy go lucky countries like Canada where everything is for the most part pretty great and say, "Look how bad socialism has worked for them!!" And the masses believe it because if Glen Beck shouts it loud enough it must be true.
While on one hand one feels bad for such dupes, on the other hand pity only goes so far as they've sold themselves out by not being liberal.
Remember when people kept trying to corner office holders and candidates with the question "Do you consider yourself a liberal?" And the candidate or office holder would hem and haw trying to give a nuanced response. To such a question there is only one right response: "Yes I am and if you or anyone else has a problem with that I will come over and kick you or them in the nuts."
the majority of Americans,
Wow.
Who do you get your talking points from? Let me guess... Martha Coakley?
What a coincidence! The Glob
What a coincidence! The Glob had Coakley up by 5 points this morning! MoveOn - what a joke.
take home message from Brown victory?
I have to wonder about the validity of this poll. I work in two very different settings and have the opportunity to chat with people while I am working. One place that I work is a blue collar major city south of Boston. The other is a fairly affluent south shore suburb of Boston and the overwhelming sense I got was that people felt they were not being listened to. Very few people expressed a desire for our politicians to push this HCR through. Obviously, this is not "scientific". To a large degree the folks I talk to already have medicare so there may be less interest in HCR. I did not get a strong anti-Coakley sentiment(or at least people did not express this). The knock on Coakley was lack of confidence that she could represent the average person since she didn't understand the average person. She sure did not help this perception. No need to repeat them here. The people who had attended the tea parties obviously felt this very strongly. I see and hear many disparaging comments about tea party participants but, at least to me, they don't seem much looser wrapped then some of the very partisan commenters on BMG, or local politicians who treat their constituents and reporters with such scorn. I actually think this election will be a good thing for the DC party, if not for HCR, but only if the pols remember that they mostly need to "represent" their constituents.
And if so that is an even
WTF are you smoking? I disagree with Scott Brown on the issues but feel that he is just as qualified for this seat as anyone else that has run for office. He disagrees with you, we get it. Instead of saying that people in suburbs should not be trusted to vote why don;t you get off your butt and convince them next time around. This is how Democracy works. Scott Brown visited them, Martha Coakley did not.
Who were you polling?
As an Obama and Scott Brown voter, I did not vote for Brown because the bill didn't "go far enough" I voted for him because we're spiraling into debt at an impossible rate and taking over healthcare will be an economic calamity.
The spending needs to stop. If the states want universal coverage they can pass it themselves like MA and many others already have. What is that? Costs are rising in these states faster than any other? Yeah, that sounds like a fantastic idea for the entire country... Please. The last thing we need is to pass a bill allowing the insurance companies to fleece us more than they do already. There's a reason they backed Obama over McCain 3:1 and Coakley over Brown 100%.
Let the states handle their own coverage plans, the last thing we need is another Medicare/Medicaid issue where it is completely unsustainable.
The feds should instead allow competition between insurance companies across state lines (aka have a real market for insurance, which in non-protected industries drives down cost and raises quality - see Lasik), and stop giving benefits to work-supplied insurance policies over independent policies (this is the cause of so much turmoil over equating losing a job to losing insurance... independent policies are so much more expensive because of government tax policy toward that given by your job)
UHC is very much something that would be nearly impossible to undo once set in motion. There are still simpler reforms we can attempt first, and again there is nothing stopping states from issuing coverage (other than they HAVE to balance a budget, unlike our retarded federal government which just sells us out more and more to nations like China, undermining our national security).
If the states can't balance their budgets, and the feds are already raising the debt by almost a trillion per year, despite the bleeding hearts I cannot support UHC with the evidence against our government's capacity to run it efficiently. A kid born today already has almost $50k of tax debt, which is a travesty.
The left can start to decry "market" based insurance when we actually have it. Our policy inhibits competition, which allows companies to get away with bad service and lack of choice for a variety of policy needs. Additionally, I grow tired of "tax the rich!" - the top 10% already paid 70% of the federal taxes. How is this fair? This isn't a solution to financial problems addressing the country - we need to reign in spending and stop the bloated inefficiencies of government where we can.