Via Geraghty, the numbers from the very credible polling firm Public Opinion Strategies:
Latest poll on how the public feels about health care, from Public Opinion Strategies, finds… well, more skepticism: 15 percent strongly favor Obama’s proposed health care plan, 10 percent somewhat favor, 5 percent somewhat oppose, 32 percent strongly oppose, 37 percent no opinion yet. (That comes out to 25 total favor, 37 percent total oppose.) The pollsters found that 38 percent said the more they hear about the plan, the more they like it; 49 percent said the more they hear, the less they like it. Ten percent said they didn’t know.
I struggle with complex math, but that looks to me like Americans who have an opinion on health care oppose the president’s plan by a 3 to 2 margin. Meanwhile, more than a third of Americans have no opinion, which I continue to believe is more a product of the Democrats’ strategy than some failure on the part of the media or the people themselves. With the nation focused almost exclusively on health care over the last month, Democrats chose to use all the bandwidth they had to paint the opposition as Nazis. Perhaps if they’d used that time to explain the bill and address the concerns of opponents, these numbers wouldn’t be quite so catastrophic.
