Medicare for All is more popular than Deciding to Win report claims
The latest in what seems to be a rising tide of dubious centrist data.
A new centrist organization has rolled out a slick new publication filled with data demonstrating that the Democratic Party has veered too far left. In my last post, that story was about The Argument, which rolled out some dubious data on Zohran Mamdani’s national popularity. This time, the story is about Welcome, which has been enrosed by a who’s who of liberal pundits and consultant — and which is funded by billionaires ranging from Reid Hoffman in the center to Sam Walton (their biggest donor) on the right.
Welcome has published a report called Deciding to Win, which studies why Democrats have lost so much ground and how they can regain it. Their recommendation: a kind of neo-Clintonian triangulation that prioritizes an “it’s the economy, stupid” focus on kitchen table issues but urges “moderation” on basically everything else. And when it comes to kitchen table issues, ambitious solutions are also off the table. So no free child care, no free college, and no Medicare for All.
That last recommendation was particularly surprising. Unlike most centrist outlets, DtW goes out of its way to praise left politicians:
We have much to learn from the relentless focus of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani on lowering the cost of living…
But dig into their substantive agenda at all, and it becomes clear that DtW is just name dropping left politicians in order to glom onto their popularity and position themselves as “big tent” thinkers. That they praise Bernie’s 2016 campaign and then reject that campaign’s signature issue — Medicare for All — says everything about how superficial this endorsement actually is.
Welcome’s opposition to Medicare for All isn’t just at odds with their kind words for Bernie Sanders, however. It’s also at odds with the proposal’s well-documented and persistent popularity. In their review of “What Is Popular and What Is Not,” DtW claims that net support for Medicare for All is at -11%. But here’s how their numbers stack up to other recent polling:
Deciding to Win’s number isn’t just an outlier — it a huge outlier, at odds with just about every polling on the issue I’ve seen on the issue over the last decade. Indeed, if their poll gave Medicare for All its typical numbers it would be among the most popular proposals Democrats could possibly enact. If on the other hand their numbers are credible, this marks a profound public opinion shift over just the past few months that deserves much more of an explanation than “Democrats have gone too far left.”
It’s no accident, of course, that all of this questionable data hyping the electability of centrism is appearing just as the midterm primaries get underway. Socialists may be tempted to endorse this PR campaign since it advocates for a renewed Democratic focus on economic issues, a priority that we both share — but that spin is entirely superficial. If Democrats continue to focus on small bore incrementalism, tweaking our broken healthcare system or raising the minimum wage by less than five dollars, then desperate voters are going to remain vulnerable to the false promises and misdirection of right-wing populism. This is true even if incremental progress may seem more palatable in the short term. But as we see in the case of Medicare for All, polls suggesting that voters are averse to radical change in the short term are dubious at best.
UPDATE: A reader has uncovered what seems to me an extremely plausible explanation for the polling gap. Here’s how DtW presented Medicare for All in its survey:
Some Democrats in Congress have proposed a “”Medicare for All”“ plan that would spend $2 trillion a year to create a government run health insurance plan that would cover all Americans, and eliminate all existing private health insurance plans. This new plan would eliminate monthly premiums, deductibles, and out of pocket costs. This policy would be funded by increasing the payroll tax from its current level of 15% of wage income, to a new level of 32% of wage income.
There are a lot of obvious problems with this framing, but the biggest howler is this claim that Medicare for All would be funded by a 17% payroll tax hike. The actual legislation specifies 7.5%.
DtW’s report relies on an unusual polling methodology that they claim will yield more accurate results. These results aren’t just different, however — they are radically different in a way that demands extraordinary justification. As it stands, the most likely explanation is that they gave themselves an untenable amount of rhetorical leeway in framing their questions, and got the results their framing would predict.
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