Does Almost Everyone Really Love ObamaCare?

Jon Chait cites the latest Gallup data and summarizes over at TNR that "[o]ldsters hate [the March, 2010 health care law], everybody else loves it." Ezra Klein agrees.

We'll set aside the debatable categorization of 30-64 year olds as "loving it" based upon their narrow support for the law (or even liking it; their support for the bill is almost certainly within the error margin for the subsamples).  The bigger problem here is the sole reliance upon Gallup.  Gallup is a fine pollster, but the question wording they've chosen on this issue has typically resulted in pretty good results for ObamaCare.

If you look at the pollsters in the RCP Average who have polled since Congress passed the health care bill in March, Gallup gives the most favorable results for the bill.  It's not really close; the average results by pollster are as follows:

Gallup: Favorable +1
AP/GfK: -4
WaPo: -4
Resurgent Republic (R): -5
PPP (D): -6
Democracy Corps (D): -7
GWU/Battleground: -8
CBS News: -9.7
Quinnipiac: -11.3
CNN/Op Rsrch: -13
Fox News: -15
Rasmussen: -18.42

You get the same result if you look over the course of the entire year (here I'm just using pollsters who polled at least twice, to save room):

Gallup: -2.375
AP/GfK: -2.5
ABC/WaPo: -5
PPP (D): -9
Democracy Corps (D): -9.5
CBS News: -10
Ipsos/McClatchy: -10
Pew: -10.3
NBC News/WSJ: -13.3
Quinnipiac: -15.16667
Fox News: -15.66667
Rasmussen: -16.45
CNN/Op Rsrch: -17.5

To put it differently, of the 78 polls conducted this year, four have shown net favorable results for the PPACA.  Gallup conducted three of them.

Now, this is not to hurl an accusation of intentional bias at Gallup -- at all.  Every different question wording actually gives us insight into a different aspect of a law and how it is perceived by the public (or, in the case of Rasmussen, the likely electorate).  But you nevertheless always have to bear in mind that Gallup's question choice tends to produce something akin to the best-case scenario for the health care bill, and by a fairly substantial amount.   Likewise, I'm not suggesting that we should rely only upon Rasmussen's results (which are in part moved against ObamaCare by their reliance on LVs).

But let's say that we instead normalized the Gallup results to the RCP Average, which presently has the health care plan at -6.8 on average.  That would be a net shift of ten points against the President's plan.  Under this scenario, the young would narrowly favor the plan 52-45%, while everyone else would be opposed by varying margins.

At the very least, we should at least bear in mind that, on the same day that Gallup released a poll showing that adults favor the bill by a 3-point margin, they released a second poll showing that adults favor repeal of the bill by a 5-point margin.  So an awful lot of people who supposedly love the bill would also like to see it repealed!

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