On CBS' Survey And The Repeal Question

In an update at the bottom of my last post, I mentioned that there was a point regarding current polling that was relevant to the discussion about Obamacare. As a back and forth with Greg Sargent had precipitated that post, I will use him again to set up this one.

Above all, commentators must never, ever, even entertain the possibility that the GOP repeal stance is also problematic.

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) November 26, 2013

(Before getting to the meat of this post, let me just mention that I do not think "repeal" is the GOP's prevalent position. Rather, "repeal and replace" is, at least as far as I can tell.)

While not completely certain, I suspect polling results like the following from the most recent CBS News survey feed perceptions like Greg's.

"Which comes closest to your view about the 2010 health care law? The law is working well and should be kept in place as is. There are some good things in the law, but some changes are needed to make it work better. OR, The law has so much wrong with it that it needs to be repealed entirely."
		Should be kept as is	Changes are needed	Needs to be repealed	Unsure/ No answer
		%	%	%	%
	11/15-18/13	7	48	43	2

Full survey results and the above table's HTML cribbed from here on PollingReport.com

A few things about this question and its results.

1) Let's say that one holds the position that healthcare as it existed prior to Obamacare needed to be reformed, that Obamacare had some good things in it (or at least had things in it trying to address valid problems), but that Obamacare was a big step in the wrong direction overall. How would one answer that question? Clearly not with the "should be kept as is" answer. But what about the other two?

If one took the "needs to be repealed" option as meaning "repeal, with no further action", then it seems likely that they would choose the "changes are needed" option, even though such a person might be completely open to the idea that the right approach is "repeal AND replace."

My point boils down to a criticism of the wording of the question. While the need to keep things quick and simple in survey scripts is a real imperative, adding a fourth option would not have complicated things much. The very next question, after all, had five answers. The survey would have given us more information, and therefore been a stronger survey, had the options been "Should be kept as is", "Should be kept with changes", "Should be repealed and replaced with other reforms", and "Should be repealed."

2) The collective national opinion matters less than the opinion in various states, and particularly in some states: the states where the coming political battles are bound to be most impactful.

To my mind, these include states where early polling shows that the 2014 Senate race is bound to be competitive, and states that can legitimately be considered as potential battlegrounds in the next Presidential election. To remove my subjectivity from that last part, let's use any state where neither Obama nor Romney took 55% of the vote. Between these two conditions, I come up with Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Almost by definition, these states will be "redder" than the rest of the country, as they are comprised of states where things were close (like the country overall) plus states where the Senator is from the party opposite to the state's general composition. Where Obama won the overall popular vote by 4 percentage points, and won states other than those listed by 8 percentage points, it was essentially a tie in these states (with Romney "winning" overall by just under 800k).

By no means am I suggesting that one "unskew" this CBS poll. I merely am making the case that it should be obvious that where the war will be fought, the numbers in the above likely would be more favorable to the Republican position than those numbers are. What we really need are polls of these states, in aggregate or (even better) individually.

Give us polls in these states, and poll questions with choices that can best capture the most likely stances of respondents, and we will have a much better view on just how problematic a repeal effort is politically.

Added: It would be quite helpful to understand what the changes those who answered that way had in mind. If the changes amount to tinkering around the edges, it would mean one thing. If the changes amounted to, in essence, gutting nearly all of the law, it would mean another. The former would probably want to exact a political toll on those pushing a repeal effort, where the latter would likely not. I suspect, however, that the additional answer to the same question would get towards this quite a bit.