The Republican-leaning Rasmussen poll has been the most quoted exit polling data from Tuesday's election. It showed 56 percent of voters called health care their top issue -- an "astonishing" level, according to conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer in this morning's Washington Post.
What he forgot to tell readers is that 53 percent of those voters backed Martha Coakley. As Scott Rasmussen himself told Inside Politics Daily columnist Jill Lawrence:
There are people out there who really dislike it, and saw him as a vehicle to get that 41st vote (to block it). But among the people who said health care was their top issue, Coakley won. So clearly that wasn't enough to get him over the top.
That jibes with results of a Harvard School of Public Health/Boston Globe survey that was released last September. That survey found that Massachusetts voters backed their reform law by a two-to-one margin, with only slight slippage from an earlier poll. The Harvard poll also contradicted previous Rasmussen polls (not exit polls) that showed lukewarm support for reform in Massachusetts, with around a third of voters in favor, a third opposed, and a third not sure.
Another poll worth noting: Union households broke narrowly in favor of Brown, 49% to 46%, according to an AFL-CIO survey reported in the Wall Street Journal. Concerns about higher taxes were a major factor. One has to wonder if all the discussion around the misnamed Cadillac tax in the final bill -- even with a union carve out -- didn't influence some union voters.
Meanwhile, 70 percent of physicians in the Bay State before the election backed the local reform, according to this October poll published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Those well-educated voters no doubt contributed to exit polls showing college-educated voters backed Coakley by 5 points, while non-college educated voters backed Brown by 20 points.
Inside Politics Daily's Lawrence concludes that Brown's victory came from areas other than health care. He narrowly beat Coakley on the economy, which 25 percent of voters said was their top issue. And he won handily among the 10 percent of voters who said taxes and national security were their top issues.
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One week before the election, Coakley was in DC at a health and pharma lobbyist sponsored fundraiser. That says it all.
She ran as pro-choice, but her first vote would be for a law that would reduce women's access to a full range of reproductive services. She said she'd support a public option, but she was going to vote for mandates without a public option, and without a repeal of the anti-trust exemption that would stop insurers from price-fixing. She said she supported regulations to protect consumers, but she was going to vote for a bill that left the ENFORCEMENT of regulations in the hands of weak state boards that don't enforce the consumer protections we have now.
Progressives are wising up. There is no reason to support someone who doesn't deliver. Republicans throw some meat to their base - social conservatives, neocons, libertarians. Corporate Democrats like Coakley won't even throw a bone to progressives, choice activists, and gays and lesbians.
The poll results (from relatively concrete questions) at http://act.boldprogressives.org/cms/sign/mapollresults/ are well worth studying. The bottom line for health care (in addition to the observation just above) was that only a small minority appear to like the current Senate health care bill, and considerably more of the rest think it should be more aggressive than think it should be less so. The bottom line for Obama's overall performance in office is quite similar.
The main reason for her defeat is that many young voters didn't go vote. There wasn't a surge of people voting for Brown, the level of support from Republican voters is identical to that in previous elections. So, no Dem voters or Independants went to vote for him. However, many Dem. voters just didn't vote, like I said, mostly the young.
And why is that? My take is simple: young people do not go after politicians who bahave as though their election is a foregone conclusion, a done deal. They do not respond to the sense of entitlement and the sense of establishment - one reason why in 2007/08 they massively voted for Obama and not for Clinton.
I was also reading somewhere that unemployment in Massachusetts is the highest that it's been in, what, 32 or 33 years (granted that at a little over 9% that's lower than somewhere like Michigan, but still).
Jobs, jobs, jobs are a big issue in Massachusetts and nationally. And the jobs issue is something that this Administration and the Democrats have failed to address.
That's a part of the Massachusetts situation too.
It would be a fatal mistake for Democrats to make that assumption. Do two-thirds of MA voters want health care reform in general? Yes. Do they want either one of these god-awful, obnoxious bills to pass? No.
It appears the the Democratic controlled Congress wants to pretend to take action. Blah, blah, blah; then, go home.