Despite Bernie Sanders coming a distant second to Joe Biden in South Carolina, his signature proposal of Medicare For All did well there, winning majority support, making it four in a row. Why it did not translate into votes for him in that state is unclear since Sanders’s landslide win in Nevada was boosted by the popularity of Medicare For All. It will be interesting to see what role it plays in the Super Tuesday contests.
In Nevada, as in both Iowa and New Hampshire, about 6 out every 10 voters in both entrance and exit polls said they supported eliminating private insurance and creating a single-payer system like the one Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren both support. Among Nevadans who supported a single-payer plan, according to entrance polls from Edison Research, 49% said they were backing Sanders — more than three times that of any other candidate. Even as the leaders of the powerful Culinary Union, the state’s largest, opted to publicly oppose Sanders’ Medicare for All plan without endorsing another candidate, he won 34% of caucus-goers from union households, and crushed other candidates among culinary workers specifically.
An awareness of the popularity of Medicare For All is starting to sink in among mainstream journalists like Time magazine contributor Christopher Hale who tweeted “It’s fair to say Democratic leadership fails to understand how much everyday Americans hate their private healthcare coverage”
NBC News entrance polls of Democrats on Medicare for All: 57-38% support in Iowa, 58-37% support in New Hampshire, 62-35% support in Nevada.
Maybe the candidates who staked their primary campaigns on opposing Medicare for All miscalculated.
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) February 22, 2020
For those wondering, here's the wording of our NBC News poll question on Medicare for All: "How do you feel about replacing all private health insurance with a single government plan for everyone?" https://t.co/Sbm3OKuAhO
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) February 23, 2020
Read this heartbreaking Twitter thread by a journalist Michelle DuBarry and you will better understand why Medicare For All is so appealing to many and why our current system is so terrible, even if you think you have ‘good’ insurance. (You have to first click on the blue bird and then on the link that says ‘Show this thread’.)
In 2010, I had good union health insurance. Obamacare was the law of the land. In November that yr my 1yo son was struck by a careless driver in a crosswalk. After two surgeries and a night in intensive care, he died.
— Michelle DuBarry (@DuBarryPie) February 23, 2020
As more and more people who thought they had good insurance come out with their horror stories, you can expect support for Medicare For All to increase.
Elizabeth Warren may be regretting that she began to waffle on Medicare For All after earlier expressing strong support for it. Some analysts are suggesting that her decline in support began with her vacillation on this issue.
We can expect Pete Buttigieg, who has been one of the sharpest critics of the Sanders proposal using Republican and Fox News talking points, to soon announce that he has always supported Medicare For All.
How popular is it compared to the $1.3t first strike nuclear weapons rollout? Because thay’s what the taxpayers are getting, no matter who or what they vote for.
Seriously??? As I have suggested in comments on this blog before, just because people say they are supportive of it does not mean they are willing to fight for it nor does it mean they are necessarily unsatisfied with their current coverage. Note that the question merely asks people how they “feel” about it. That’s just not a very insightful question. This isn’t a mystery. This isn’t at all unclear. As I’ve said before, it’s not as popular as you think it is.
Well, the BernieBros came out in full force with their snake emojis and whatnot when she did that (which wasn’t necessarily “waffling,” but acknowledging the reality that it isn’t as popular as people like you believe it is). Oh, but since BernieBros don’t exist, I guess I must have been imaging that. And I guess Warren was, too, since she said in one of these last two debates that, “Bernie’s plan doesn’t explain how to get there, doesn’t show how we’re going to get enough allies into it, and doesn’t show enough about how we’re going to pay for it. I dug in. I did the work. And then Bernie’s team trashed me for it.” Apparently that was just another of Warren’s lies since Bernie nor his team would ever do such a thing!
I’ll continue to say that I worry we’ll ruin our chances of actually getting M4A if we continue to delude ourselves about it’s popularity. We can’t effectively change our reality until we acknowledge what it currently is. Sure, I’ll also say as I have before that I hope I’m just overly cynical, but the evidence seems to support my cynicism. I, for example, don’t have to wonder “why [Medicare For All] did not translate into votes” since I did not start with the premise that it is popular.
@2
When you make a big deal about your committment to M4A, and then your plan turns out to be “Obamacare but worse, and I might try to make it better after my third year as president”, I’m pretty comfortable calling that waffling. Also, if the ~horrors~ of Berniebros is posting animal emojis on a social media site, I wholly support Berniebros.
This is unironically true, yes.
Mean tweets bad. Dead poor people good.
So somewhere north of a third of Democratic primary voters oppose Medical for All and somehow this is going to help us beat Trump in November?
marner @#5,
No policy proposal of any substance garners 100% support. But that does not mean that the people who do not support it are automatically going to oppose the person who advocates for it because most people are not single issue candidates.
What these polls do is serve as a guide as to how far out of step a candidate’s proposal is with the voters. In this case, it seems like Medicare For All is broadly popular. Will there be some for whom it is a deal breaker? Possibly. But that is true for any proposal put forward by any candidate.
I appreciate that, but we are not talking about banning fireworks or stronger leash laws.
Really all we (potentially) disagree on is if Medicare For All will help or hurt the reelection of Trump. And there I would look at the swing voters in swing states. They are the only ones who matter. And I know it’s the Third Way, but their Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin polls suggest that building off of the ACA would perform better in the general https://www.thirdway.org/memo/state-polls-show-medicare-for-all-could-cost-democrats-the-blue-wall-in-2020
By the way, really enjoy your blog. Thank you!
Building off the ACA might perform better, but winning on a shit platform isn’t any better than losing on a good one.
Like yay, we managed to pass a plan that covers approximately nobody and will easily be gutted by the next republican majority congress. Rad. That was so much better than…our current shitty system that covers nobody and was easily gutted by the republicans.
Except that about 90% of us are covered.
Yeah, we’re quote-unquote covered, neat. I’m sure is a comfort to the people who are just outside the bullshit draconian subsidy ceiling or the people skipping rent to pay the premiums for their insulin. Hey, I’m one ambulance trip from homelessness, but at least I’m covered.
Coverage that forces millions of people to contend with the literal life or death extortion of private insurance and for-profit healthcare is coverage in name only.