Posted on 06/30/2015 12:55:29 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
It’s the first post-ruling poll I’ve seen in either case. There wasn’t much mystery about where the public was on ObamaCare subsidies — “free” money! — but there was a little suspense around the SSM decision in light of this YouGov poll last week showing a plurality of the public opposed to having the Court decide the issue. That raised the question of whether a backlash might be brewing around process. Sure, Americans support gay marriage in principle, but what happens when the judiciary wrests that issue out of the states’ hands and settles it as a matter of equal protection? Would that alienate some supporters?
Nope, if CNN’s data is accurate.
According to a new CNN/ORC poll, 63% support the Court’s ruling upholding government assistance for lower-income Americans buying health insurance through both state-operated and federally-run health insurance exchanges. Slightly fewer, 59%, say they back the ruling which made same-sex marriages legal in all 50 states…
Democrats are more apt to say they back the ruling on the 2010 health care law sometimes referred to as Obamacare — 79% back it — than they are to support the same-sex marriage decision, of which 70% favor. Among Republicans, 54% said they oppose the ruling on health care, while 59% oppose the ruling on same-sex marriage, not a statistically-significant difference. Among independents, 63% support each ruling.
Republicans are most apt in the new poll to say the Court’s ideology is too far to the left: 69% see the Court as too liberal. That’s up from 2012, when 59% of Republicans called it too liberal.
Of the various demographics analyzed (sex, race, age, region, income, education, party, ideology), the only groups that had a majority opposed to both rulings were Republicans and conservatives. (Senior citizens opposed the gay-marriage ruling but supported the ObamaCare decision.) And even they weren’t as lopsided as you might think: 42 percent of Republicans backed the O-Care subsidies opinion while 40 percent backed the SSM opinion. Are those numbers credible?
Well, various polls in the last few months have found support for gay marriage among GOPers running at around 35-40 percent. Meanwhile, among the broader population, a CBS/NYT poll taken just a few weeks ago pegged support for gay marriage at 57 percent while an NBC/WSJ poll conducted around the same time found that the exact same number would support a Supreme Court decision declaring it a constitutional right. All of those numbers are right in line with CNN’s findings today, suggesting that nearly everyone who backs SSM in principle also backs SCOTUS’s ruling. Federalism concerns are apparently irrelevant. As for O-Care, the same CBS/NYT poll I mentioned asked people whether they’d back a Court decision that allowed federal subsidies to continue. Fully 70 percent said yes. When asked what Congress should do if SCOTUS struck down the subsidies, 64 percent said they should pass a law restoring the subsidies. Again, these numbers are in line with the 63 percent number that CNN got today. The public may dislike ObamaCare in general but they looooove those premium discounts from Uncle Sam.
Then again, by tweaking the questions, you doubtless could have driven these numbers lower. Here’s CNN’s ObamaCare question:
The question in King v. Burwell wasn’t whether giving subsidies to poorer Americans to pay their health insurance is legal in the abstract, as that question seems to imply. The question was whether the text of the ObamaCare statute itself authorized those subsidies for consumers on the federal exchange. You could have rephrased this question to ask, “If a law passed by Congress authorizing health-care subsidies is unclear, should clarifying it be a job for Congress or the Supreme Court?” Imagine the numbers you’d have gotten for that one. But then, that question’s not really fair either. The core issue in King for 99 percent of the public is, “Should the government keep the free money flowing to people who’ve come to depend on it?” The legal niceties of that, whether subsidies are legal or illegal given the way the law was drafted and which branch of government should be responsible for cleaning up this mess, are probably just that — niceties.
The gay-marriage question is more solid:
There are ways to object to that. Surely you could have gotten a result that’s less rosy about SSM by emphasizing that many state majorities have banned the practice and that a SCOTUS ruling would effectively end democratic debate on the issue. On the other hand, you could have probably gotten a more rosy result by larding the question up with flowery Kennedyesque language about whether states should be allowed to prevent two people who love each other from marrying. I think the way CNN phrased it is a good compromise, focusing strictly on the practical effects of the ruling — marriage in all 50 states, a sweeping outcome ordered by a Court. Yes or no? Most say yes.
I believe it. I’d be interested to see the breakdown by age groups. I’d say people in my group, those born in the 1970s, the rate would be 75%, and in the millennium generation most likely around 99%.
These days, I’d say the Chinese occupy the moral high ground.
Bet she loves that rainbow flag - it's pretty.
Discount those numbers by at least 10 percent.
Except for the fact that the courts had to shove gay marriage through the courts....so no dice, in my opinion. Polls are propaganda tools.
Sure, I believe in the accuracy and honesty of a poll from CNN. /s
This is just sad denial at this point. Conservatives totally have sat passively for the last 20 years while the media, liberal churches, and Hollywood have wages all out assault on Christian values. Pat Buchanan, who I don't like, totally had it right with his culture war speech in 1992.
Yes, we disagreed with President Bush, but we stand with him for the freedom to choose religious schools, and we stand with him against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women. We stand with President Bush -- We stand with President Bush for right-to-life and for voluntary prayer in the public schools. And we stand against putting our wives and daughters and sisters into combat units of the United States Army. And we stand, my -- my friends -- We also stand with President Bush in favor of the right of small towns and communities to control the raw sewage of pornography that so terribly pollutes our popular culture. We stand with President Bush in favor of federal judges who interpret the law as written, and against would-be Supreme Court justices like Mario Cuomo who think they have a mandate to rewrite the Constitution.Friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. And so to the Buchanan Brigades out there, we have to come home and stand beside George Bush.
I know the George Bush part is hard to swallow at this point, but his key point about culture and religious war was right, and america did not listen, or want to hear it.
This Obamacare approval rating is bizarre and conflicts with this poll just a few weeks ago:
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2015/06/08/obamacare-poll-n2009648
WaPo Poll: Obamacare Approval Ties All-Time Low
The above article says:
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Support for keeping the subsidies comes despite the law polling as poorly as ever. The survey finds opinion on the health-care law among the worst in Post-ABC polling; 54 percent oppose, up six percentage points from a year ago. Support ties the record low of 39 percent, which was last hit in April 2012...The disconnect in the new poll — that a majority opposes the law, while a nearly equal majority does not want the Supreme Court to rule against it — is driven by political independents as well as Republicans. Independents oppose the law 56 percent to 35 percent. But they also want a ruling in favor of subsidies by almost exactly the same margin.
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Now they are telling us that somehow and magically, within the span of three weeks, something changed to cause the approval to go up to a humongous 63% after the SCOTUS RULING?
Something’s rotten in Denmark.
I think my point is most people are now used to it and for the most part accept it as it is not affecting them. As a result, there is a lot of support for it whether you or I like it or not.
A CNN Poll is usually HEAVILY SKEWED in the direction that validates their LIBERAL POV.
“This is just sad denial at this point.”
Unfortunately, we see an awful lot of that on these threads.
We’ve been in the echo chamber so long we didn’t notice the country turned away from us. We need to get our heads out of the chamber if we want any hope of changing it back or preserving what little victories we can eke out.
Maybe. Hope not though. I think a lot more people draw the line if one is controlling another in a bad way.
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