Liberal Group Commissions Big Poll To Prove To Blue Dogs Public Option Is Popular

Liberal Group Commissions Big Poll To Prove To Blue Dogs Public Option Is Popular

There’s apparently nothing that anyone can do to convince Blue Dog and conservative Dems that the public option is popular and not politically risky, but that isn’t stopping one major liberal group from giving it a big try.

Health Care for America Now, the major umbrella pro-reform group, has commissioned a big new poll of 91 conservative House swing districts — including many Blue Dog and rural ones — that finds the public option has solid majority support among those voters.

The poll and its accompanying memo — which is being circulated among House Dems and was sent over by a source — also send a strong warning to conservative Dems that if health care fails, the resulting damage to the President will rebound on them.

The poll, by respected Dem pollster John Anzalone, finds that 54% of these swing district voters support the public option, and makes the case that these voters emphatically don’t want a “trigger,” the compromise of choice in some quarters:

The public option shouldn’t be considered in isolation. Including a public option is essential to implementing an individual mandate. Voters also already prefer the implementation of a public option, and do not see a need for a trigger. There’s over-whelming opposition to an individual mandate when the only choices are private insur-ance, but there’s net support for a mandate when people have the choice of a public option. And swing district voters are convinced private sector healthcare has failed to make health care affordable, and prefer the public option now rather than waiting on a trigger option.

It also says that failure to get reform done will be courting disaster, and could rebound specifically on swing-district Dems as it did in 1994:

Swing District Dems will rise and fall with Obama. A failure on healthcare will likely hurt Obama’s approval ratings and in turn hurt Democrats in 2010, with swing district Democrats particularly susceptible given the competitiveness of their districts. Members need only revisit 1994 to gauge the electoral ramifications (52 lost seats) for the govern-ing party when the President pushes aggressively for healthcare reform but comes up short.

Now the trick will be to get conservative Dems to read this memo and perhaps even allow it to influence their thinking a bit.

http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/health-care/liberal-group-commissions-big-poll-to-prove-to-blue-dogs-public-option-is-popular/

Clearly these corporatist democrats are in it for the money and power. Blue dogs will undermine liberal democratic policy at every turn, that is their very reason for existence.

Good luck making headway based on facts with these trojan-horse democrats.

At the least, it will expose them as liars when they keep on making excuses.