Pew on Medicare
On Monday,
Pew released the latest poll on Ryan's Curse:
Opposition to Ryan Medicare Plan from Older, Attentive Americans
Those ages 50 and older oppose this proposal, which is part of Rep. Paul Ryan’s deficit reduction plan, by a 51% to 29% margin. And this opposition is intense: 42% strongly oppose this kind of change, while only 19% strongly favor it. The same is true among people who say they have heard a lot about this proposal – fully 56% are opposed while 33% are in favor, and strong opposition among this group outweighs strong support by two-to-one (50% vs. 25%).
As we get closer to election day, and people tune in, opposion is only going to grow.
In fact, to put in perspective all the recent polls, pollster.com has this great table:
If you know something about the proposal, you hate it. Pew was best at separating those who did know and those who did not.
Why did the Pew Research question yield less opposition and more uncertainty than the other polls? One reason is that, unlike the CNN question, it does not explicitly identify the plan as sponsored by the Republicans. A second may be that the Pew Research question immediately followed another that asked respondents how closely they had been following the Medicare proposal. Many of the 28 percent who said they had heard "nothing at all about it" may have felt nudged to express uncertainty on the next question.
The questions posed by Quinnipiac University and ABC News/Washington Post differ in two ways: They use a different format, explicitly posing the choice between the proposal and letting Medicare "remain as it is today." And they also provide more details about the proposal, specifically noting that the proposed credit people would receive would be "fixed amounts" of money.
We've said it before and we will say it again: the GOP doesn't have a messaging problem with Ryan's plan to end medicare as we know it, they have a policy problem. And the more people focus in on it, the more Ryan's Curse is going to be a GOP problem for this election.
