About All Those Polls

Polls tell you a lot.  They also give far too many people an overinflated sense of certain political trends.  No matter where you turn today, you are likely to hear, “polls show that Maine people overwhelmingly feel…” followed by any number of phrases.  Beware listening too much to polls – they are mostly used by a very (very) small minority of people who are passionate about whatever cause is being talked about in that poll, to persuade you to join the cool kids table, and think the way the rest of us think.

But what is the reality of polling data?

The answer is of course dependent on a number of things.  To illustrate, lets take a look at the newest polling data from the Research 2000/DailyKos survey of Maine this week.

When asked “Do you favor or oppose creating a government-administered health insurance option that anyone can purchase to compete with private insurance plans?“, 61% of respondents in Maine said “you bet”.

In other news, when asked “do you like kittens“, a large majority of respondents also said yes.

Anyway, this poll and others like it have been quickly pounced on by the supporters of a public option.  “WHY?” they ask, “when the people of Maine so overwhelmingly support a public option, are Snowe and Collins unwilling to sign on to it?  Will this spell their doom?”.

What they – and far too many people these days – fail to realize is that while expressing support for the idea of a public option, these polls have no measurement of enthusiasm.  In other words, they don’t measure the level to which a respondent would “go to the mat” over the issue – whether they feel so strongly about it that they would “die on the hill” for it.

The reason Maine Senators Snowe and Collins do not feel beholden to this “overwhelming support” is because it is extremely loose support.  They (rightly) do not believe that this particular issue is one that voters have any desire to “go to the mat” over – because their support for it is little more than “hey, you think this is a good idea?”, “yeah, sure why the hell not… what’s for lunch?”

Conversely, if you are talking about a poll that said 60% of Mainers opposed gay marriage, you can bet your entire life savings that both of them would risk quite a bit going against that opinion.

Why?  Because when voters respond to questions like that (as well as abortion, taxes and a whole host of other high profile issues), they are far more intensely invested in their answer.  You typically don’t get many tepid answers on abortion or gay marriage – from either side of the debate – when you poll the subject.  People who have opinions on those types of issues believe in them deeply, and so any polling that shows overwhelming support for either side of it carries with it real political weight.

But there is no such political weight behind a public option – even though proponents argue there is.  People who answer yes to that question overwhelmingly don’t even understand what a public option is, beyond the cookie-cutter sound-bit explanation they get on the survey.  It is an enormously complex issue, and voters have spent the last several months getting confused about what it all means – whatever support is shown is very tepid to say the least.

Now, does any of this mean that Maine is not a state where the public option sells well, or sells better?  No, of course not – I very much do believe that the voters of Maine probably favor a public option overall, and are probably comfortable with the government setting up another program to help curb healthcare costs.

My issue is how it is portrayed – that Mainer voters are firmly invested in it.  People who read these polls really honestly believe that 60% of Mainers are passionately, deeply behind the idea of a public option, and that they are so invested in the idea that they will create political havoc for anyone who opposes it.

That simply isn’t the case, and its about time we said so.