Obamacare is More Popular Than CNN Thinks

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From CNN:

A majority of Americans still oppose the nation’s new health care measure, three years after it became law, according to a new survey.

According to the poll, 43% of the public says it supports the health care law….Fifty-four percent of those questioned say they oppose the law, also relatively unchanged since 2010. The survey indicates that 35% oppose the health care law because it’s too liberal, with 16% saying they oppose the measure because it isn’t liberal enough.

Right. Let me rephrase this:

According to a recent poll, 59 percent of Americans support Obamacare, while 35 percent oppose it. Among supporters, 43 percent support the law as is, while 16 percent think it doesn’t go far enough.

The way CNN words the question in this poll, they almost have no choice but to say that 54 percent of the public opposes Obamacare. But that’s wildly misleading. If you oppose Obamacare solely because you think it should be more generous, then you’re not part of the group that’s commonly thought of as the opposition: tea partiers, conservatives, Republicans, and so forth. These are the folks who want to repeal Obamacare completely and leave it a smoking husk, and they’re the ones most of us think of as the “opposition.” If your main problem with Obamacare is that it’s not the NHS, you aren’t part of that group.

This has been a problem with Obamacare polls since the beginning. It’s also been a problem with CNN polls since the beginning. Why do they refuse to fix it and describe things more accurately?

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GREAT JOURNALISM, SLOW FUNDRAISING

Our team has been on fire lately—publishing sweeping, one-of-a-kind investigations, ambitious, groundbreaking projects, and even releasing “the holy shit documentary of the year.” And that’s on top of protecting free and fair elections and standing up to bullies and BS when others in the media don’t.

Yet, we just came up pretty short on our first big fundraising campaign since Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting joined forces.

So, two things:

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2) If you’re not ready to donate but you’re interested enough in our work to be reading this, please consider signing up for our free Mother Jones Daily newsletter to get to know us and our reporting better. Maybe once you do, you’ll see it’s something worth supporting.

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