The malleability of public opinion

Ezra Klein and Kevin Drum both talk about a recent poll on the question of mandated insurance. In the poll, 56% said they support requiring people to get health insurance, and 41% were against it. But…if you tell the opposers that low-income families will get subsidies to help them pay, then a third of them switch.

Klein says “In other words, a solid majority supports the individual mandate. And a third of the opponents become supporters if they learn that there will be subsidies for people who can’t afford insurance.”

However, I think that’s a misleading way of characterizing it. Or, if misleading is a bit too strong, it’s at least incomplete. Because what’s left out of that analysis is a deeper effect, which Drum points to, namely that “when you add some additional detail you always get a certain number of people to flip sides.”

He wonders about this in a general sense: whether work has been done to quantify just how big of a swing is usual in these sorts of circumstances.

But I think it also reminds us that you can’t uncritically add the original 56% and one-third of 41% to get 70% support for mandates. Because we don’t know how many of the supporters could be just as easily convinced to change their mind. Perhaps if they knew subsidies were being offered, they’d stop supporting it. They like the idea of forcing everyone to participate but don’t like the idea of their tax dollars going to support it. That’s not a completely insane position to have.

The point being that it’s very easy to take these sort of polling numbers and extrapolate a general sense of where the society is at. But ultimately, the numbers are so fluid and unstable that it’s really hard to draw meaningful conclusions at all. Even the idea that 97% of people are remotely close to having a formed opinion on this question is laughable.

That doesn’t mean polls like this are useless. They definitely help to clarify a general sense of attitudes and give us a window into what sorts of arguments might be useful. But we really should strive to remind ourselves that they are at best rough indicators and certainly are not dispositive.

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