Health Care Polls: October 2011

Friday, October 28, 2011

Dip in ACA Favorability

In the Kaiser Family Foundation monthly health care polls, the percentage of Americans expressing a favorable opinion toward the Affordable Care Act (the new law enacted in March 2010) has been in the low 40s nearly every month from August 2010 to September 2011. In the new October 2011 poll, however, favorability is down to 34%, compared with 51% who express an unfavorable attitude. We'll keep an eye on the Kaiser polls over the next few months to see if this month's drop in approval is a one-time blip or the start of a sustained trend.

R2K Polling Controversy

On June 29, 2010, the website Daily Kos announced that polls it had commissioned from the firm Research 2000 were "likely bunk." Kos has asked readers to disregard all R2K polls done for his site. Any Kos/R2K polls cited here on the Health Care Polls blog over the past several months should accordingly be disregarded, as well. I am leaving them up, however, as part of the historical record. Often, my analyses of polling trends that included R2K surveys also included polls from other firms, too. I hope the pending lawsuits between Kos and R2K will reveal whether the latter's polls are completely valid, completely made-up, or perhaps, as Nate Silver suggested, the product of data being merely "mangled."