Survey Shows Massive Spike in Anti-Obamacare Opinion

The Kaiser Family Foundation publishes the monthly tracking poll
that, practically speaking, serves as the canonical survey of
public opinion about Obamacare. That’s not to say that other
surveys don’t matter, or that the averages and aggregates aren’t
important; they are. But if you’re only going to look at one number
to gauge public opinion about the health law, this is it. 

This month’s
survey is out, and the news for Obamacare is bad. Really bad.
So bad, in fact, that I’m not entirely sure I believe it.

In the last month, the survey reports an eight-point increase in
unfavorable views of the health law, rising from 45 to 53 percent,
and a two point drop in favorability from 39 down to 37. 

Unfavorables are at their highest point ever in the survey, and
the gap between positive and negative views of the law is nearly as
large as it has ever been.
Here’s Kaiser’s graph:

I’m skeptical that this is anything more than a statistical
abberation. The jump in unfavorables is too big, too fast; typical
month to month variation is much smaller. And there’s no obvious
explanation for why we’d see a giant spike this month after several
months in which negative views of the law softened slightly. This
result will need to hold for several more months before I think it
represents a real, large spike in negative opinion. 

That said, this isn’t exactly good news for the law either,
especially looked at in context. The size of the spike seems too
big, but it suggests the direction public opinion is going
post-open-enrollment. The trend is backed up by other polls.

According to
the RealClearPolitics average, which combines the results of
several other polls, opposition to the health law has increased
since May, nearly equaling the negative opinion heights we saw last
fall during the botched rollout of the exchanges. 

Even if, as I suspect, Kaiser’s big spike in negative opinions
about the law turns out to largely be a one-time blip related to
their sample, the opinion trend here isn’t positive. Democrats
thought they had partially defused the law as a political issue in
the wake of April’s unexpectedly large last-minute sign-up surge,
but this, combined with
other polls of individual races, suggests that Obamacare is
likely to continue to be a drag on the party when the mid-term
elections arrive in November.