The key Medicare provision in the Paul Ryan budget recently voted for by almost every Republican in the House is profoundly unpopular with the American people, according the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll. When simply asked whether they wanted Medicare to remain a defined benefits plan or see it changed into a voucher system to [...]

Voting for the new health care law was extremely damaging to Democrats’ re-election prospects in 2010 according an analysis by Seth Masket and Steve Greene. From Enik Rising: For the paper, we look at the impact of four roll call votes: health reform, the stimulus, cap-and-trade, and the TARP bailout from 2008. We find that [...]

The passage of health care reform is touted as one of President Obama’s most prominent achievements, yet it wasn’t popular with the American people when it passed, and continues to grow slightly less popular as time goes on. Gallup finds that on its one year anniversary, fewer Americans think reform was a good thing. Like [...]

Roughly a quarter of Americans actually think the new health care law has already been repealed, according to the latest poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation: In the wake of the health reform repeal vote in the U.S. House and the ongoing legal challenges over the individual mandate, nearly half the country either believes that [...]

It’s Christmas time, and I’m surrounded by family. Like with almost any large family gathering, the conversation eventually turns to polite questions about work. The family knows I write about politics, so, over the course of several days, I tend to have a brief conversation about Congress and politics with each member of the family. [...]

Massachusetts is considered one of the most liberal states in the country. It has already adopted a private insurance-based, near-universal health insurance system under Republican Governor Mitt Romney. Given that, it should come as no surprise that, in a large swath of the state, voters signaled their willingness to adopt a universal single-payer health care [...]

There are only so many ways to say elections are heavily about the economy, but this chart from Pew really jumped out at me. look at the breakdown based on how people think the economy is doing: Things were already bad in early 2006. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were clear quagmires and real [...]

In January FDL hired SurveyUSA to test “swing” congressional districts and find out just how much damage Democrats’ incompetent handling of the health care debate was doing to them. The results from our four polls in OH-01, AR-02, IN-02, and NY-01 are almost identical to final results yesterday:

There has been a lot of talk about the supposed “Obama Paradox.” It’s the idea that President Obama is raking up “wins,” signing into law big bills with fancy names (regardless of whether they will actually do what they need to), yet Democrats are still dropping in the polls. A big part of this problem [...]

DNC Chair Tim Kaine has announced that Democrats will run on a platform of being the “results party”–a move that leaves me wondering whether it is stupid or simply the only choice for Democrats. . . because they can’t deny the fact that they fully control Washington. From Tim Kaine’s remarks: At a time when [...]