Polls Show Health Care Speech Improved Obama’s Ratings On Health Care

President Barack Obama
Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

The polls that have been conducted since President Obama’s speech to Congress on Wednesday night collectively suggest that Obama improved his position on the issue of health care.

• Democracy Corps (D) conducted a dial-tested focus group of debate-watchers in Denver, Colorado, made up of swing voters who were almost evenly divided 54%-46% between Obama and John McCain in the 2008 election. Among this group, support and opposition of the health care plan went from 46%-46% before the speech, to 66%-30% afterward. In addition, before the speech only 44% described the plan as “the right kind of change,” with 52% saying it was not. That number then shifted to 50%-40% after the speech.

• A CNN snap poll from after the speech showed that speech-watchers increased in their support for Obama’s proposals, from 53% up to 67%. However, the caveat here is that the debate-watching audience was disproportionately Democratic compared to the general population: Democrats 45%, Republicans 18%, and the remainder independent.

• A new CBS poll this morning of the general population, not just people who watched the speech — meaning that we can get a measurement of how this has affected the whole country — found that Obama’s approval on the issue of health care reform has gone up. CBS re-interviewed the same respondents from a late August poll, in which Obama’s approval on health care was only 40%, to 47% disapproval. That number has now jumped up to 52%-38%.

Latest DC
Comments
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: