Cross-posted from my Tpmcafe blog (truthseeker77's blog).
About that new USA Today/Gallup poll.
The USA Today plus every liberal blogger and his mom is touting a new USA Today/Gallup poll released today, which found that "Americans by 9 percentage points have a favorable view of the health care overhaul," as a sudden turnaround in opinion regarding health care reform. The problem is...USA Today/Gallup never used the "is it a good thing or a bad thing" wording prior to today's poll. Rather, they used the more common "favor/oppose" pair. You might ask what's the big deal about questions that basically mean the same but are worded differently.
Let's see what what a veteran polling expert (Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com) had to say about a recent NBC/WSJ poll that got significantly different results while asking two seemingly similar question:
Question #1) From what you have heard about Barack Obama's health care plan, do you think his plan is a good idea or a bad idea? If you do not have an opinion either way, please just say so. 36% said good, 48% said bad.
Then they follow up:
Question #2) Do you think it would be better to pass Barack Obama's health care plan and make its changes to the health care system or to not pass this plan and keep the current health care system? 46% said pass, 45% said do not pass.
If you look at those questions, they mean essentially the exact same thing. However, Blumenthal criticized the poll, saying "The NBC/WSJ poll has tracked their good idea/bad idea formulation for almost a year. Abruptly switching introduces some discontinuity." My emphasis.
Discontinuity is precisely what we see in today's USA Today/Gallup poll, and that's why I recommend that you take it with a grain of salt. If other pollsters (Pew, Bloomberg, whatever) come up with post-HCR-passing-date polls in which the results are not significantly changed from pre-HCR ones, then we will all feel like fools who jumped the gun.
There is nothing in my view that we can compare today's USA Today/Gallup poll to without engaging in an apples-oranges comparison.
Thanks for reading.