If you watched cable last night, you may have had so much exit poll data thrown your way that you’re having trouble picking through the clutter. Compiled from CNN.com’s presentation of national data compiled from separate house races, here are a half-dozen notable results—some counter-intuitive, some revealing—that you might have missed.
1: Most voters don’t want to see the health care bill repealed—and a majority of those who support it would like to see it expanded.
Here are the numbers: 16 percent of voters don’t want Congress to change the bill. A further 31 percent would like to see it expanded. Both categories of health care bill supporters voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. Of course, many Democrats favored a more extensive health plan—single payer, say, or one that included a public option—during its construction and passage.
2: A great majority of voters expressed false beliefs about the effect of the stimulus package.
About one third say the stimulus bill helped the economy, one third say it had no effect, and one third say it actually harmed the economy. The latter two thirds of Americans are wrong. Studies of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act undertaken by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, and several major private-sector economic research firms, estimate that its total effect will be 2.5 million jobs.
3: While a slim majority of voters said that Obama’s policies would “hurt the country”…
52 percent say they hurt, 43 percent say they help.
4: … a majority (61 percent) of voters said their vote wasn’t an expression of opposition to Obama.
Of those who said their votes were in opposition to Obama, 93 percent voted for Republican House candidates. Those who said expressing an opinion on Obama through their vote was not a factor in picking a House candidate, leaned to Democratic candidates by 53 percent versus 43 percent to Republicans.
5: Nearly a quarter (23 percent) of Republican voters had an unfavorable view of the Republican party.
That was about twice the number of Democratic voters (11 percent) who said the same about the Democratic party.
6. Two fifths of all voters said they support the “Tea Party Movement.”
Republican candidates got 87 percent of the votes of those claiming to back the tea party, meaning just shy of seventy percent of all votes for Republican candidates came from self-identified tea party supporters.
This is pure propaganda.
48% favor repeal of the healthcare bill.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1789/2010-midterm-elections-exit-poll-analysis
A great majority of voters expressed false beliefs about the effect of the stimulus package.
The jobs numbers are pure estimates. The CBO also used the same model that said unemployment wouldn't rise above 8%, which was wrong. There's no mention of the resulting debt service required for funding the bill. No consideration to how many private sector jobs were pushed out, etc. The view that it helped is myopic at best, and you claim that it's a "false" belief to doubt it.
"While a slim majority of voters said that Obama’s policies would “hurt the country”…
52 - 43 = 9% that's not a SLIM majority.
#1 Posted by Spud, CJR on Wed 3 Nov 2010 at 05:37 PM
I'm going to guess that Spud is a card carrying member of the T-baggers
#2 Posted by D.Hawerchuk, CJR on Wed 3 Nov 2010 at 07:30 PM
No consideration to how many private sector jobs were pushed out, etc
That's because none were. The Stimulus was mostly tax cuts, which put money in the pockets of the middle class. The rest of it continued funding for infrastructure projects and state governments, which prevented the need to lay off employees like police officers and teachers. None of this competed with the private sector.
#3 Posted by Reality, CJR on Wed 3 Nov 2010 at 08:01 PM
48% favor repeal of the healthcare bill --- which means what? The majority favor the healthcare bill.
#4 Posted by KDM, CJR on Wed 3 Nov 2010 at 08:36 PM
You guys are great!
-- I'm going to guess that Spud is a card carrying member of the T-baggers
Excellent ad hominem and refutation of my arguments!
-- That's because none were.
Prove it. You can't. Asserting that it is a "false" belief is invalid because saying that it was a success isn't falsifiable and is up for debate.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=9527995
They didn't use a model they did an empirical study.
--48% favor repeal of the healthcare bill --- which means what? The majority favor the healthcare bill.
31 % say expand it. 16% say leave as is.
31 + 16 = 47.
47 48 is bigger, making it the majority.
Not my numbers.
Thanks again guys!
#5 Posted by spud, CJR on Thu 4 Nov 2010 at 12:50 AM
Since the health care bill is sufficiently massive, affecting everyone, I think it is actually pathetic for advocates to be citing rather narrow pluralities for support of the bill. And if the public really supports Obamacare or a more left-wing alternative, they sure have a funny way of showing it. By the standards used here to drum up support for the Democrats and their positions, I can sure think of a lot of Democratic programs and policies that should be thrown out.
#6 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 4 Nov 2010 at 12:28 PM
@Spud: just because 48% is bigger than 47% it does not qualify as a majority. The correct word is a plurality.
Let's phrase is this way...
The exit poll found 16% of voters supporting the healthcare law as is. More people (48%) wanted it repealed than wanted it expanded (31%) but neither group represented a majority.
As for the fiscal stimulus, there is no way to interpret Tuesday's results except as a repudiation of Keynesian demand-side pump priming. If there is one clear policy change to come out of this election, it will be the lack of any additional federal aid to the states to prevent layoffs and any additional federal infrastructure funding to boost hiring.
Obama will no longer be allowed to be a Keynesian, to paraphrase that famous sign; he will have to revert to being an Hawaiian.
#7 Posted by Andrew Tyndall, CJR on Thu 4 Nov 2010 at 03:51 PM
@Spud and KDM:
The actual research states that 48% favor repeal of health care reform. Not the health care bill. It's important to read things carefully. This means 48% don't want the Republicans to reform the bill.
#8 Posted by Colby, CJR on Thu 4 Nov 2010 at 04:24 PM
Andrew Tyndall seems to have it about right. Everyone would like to vote himself or herself a free or subsidized entitlement. How many of the 47 or 48 percent saying they wished the bill had gone further said this because the bill does not have much in the way of controlling increased costs - surely the principal complaint about health care in this country. Or do anything to restrict the trial lawyers who have helped push up costs by encouraging extremely careful procedure. My father, who had basically an upset stomach that, at his age, could be interpreted as a symptom of a mild heart attack, was kept in the hospital for almost a week while they ran tests, trying to find that something had happened. The staff couldn't find anything, but wanted him to stay for repeated testing 'just to be sure'. They have to do this out of fear of litigation; the amount of money paid by the medical industry is not a huge percentage, but this 'hidden' tax compelled by our tort system is a considerable factor in rising health costs over the past decades. Finally he had had enough and left on his own authority. He's on the VA medical system, as a veteran, and has little good to say about the quality of check-ups; they are overburdened. There is not much in Obamacare, which is a politically motivated entitlement, that addresses these root problems of the cost of health care, and plenty of people grasp that adding a lot of people to the system who have no direct economic calculus to make when decided to occupy a bed for another day, is not exactly going to produce more resources for care.
Add to that the coy manner in which Obamacare will add illegal aliens to the system (pro-forma language denying them this entitlement, but the shooting down by Democrats of any enforcement mechanism), and you have a strong case that the measure didn't go far enough in the right direction. I don't think anyone likes the system just as it is, especially if you look at the history of Medicare's effect on costs, or the VA system's record of delivering quality care to veterans. This bill was all about 'constituency-building', creating dependency, and 'didn't go far enough' in addressing the real problems.
#9 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 4 Nov 2010 at 08:29 PM
Add to that Clint's unskeptical view of CBO numbers. Does this office have a good predictive history that merits a starry-eyed view? At any moment, the amount of financial resources is finite, so to say that public spending does not compete with private resources is ridiculous. If it were true, Greece would not be in the mess it is. The 'it would have been worse if we had not acted' is like saying Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover saved us from communism. After all, we will never know for sure, will we? Recessions in which the government has not jumped in with both feet have tended to be painful - and short. By contrast, the Great Depression lasted until war orders from overseas started coming into factories in 1938-39; after the war, when the government demobilized and slashed federal spending, there was a sharp inflationary adjustment in 1946, and then the economy recovered so quickly that Truman was elected on 3% unemployment in 1948. By contrast, Japan tried to cure its property-value slump by throwing more money at failing banks, and has been in sluggish economy for a generation. The social democracies of western Europe also suffered through a lost generation of high unemployment after repeated interventions all through the 1980s and 1990s. Only recently have they begun to reform - and this is why they are urging Obama not to take the US down the road that they knew led to stagnation in their economies.
#10 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 4 Nov 2010 at 08:40 PM
The article seems to contain a lot of wishful thinking, even -- spin.
Spud seems to have a lot of the facts on his side, but a calmer approach with less propagandizing might make his points better.
Mark Richard should take some time to study recessions in general, and the Great Depression in particular, and try to understand them a bit better.
#11 Posted by Bill, CJR on Thu 4 Nov 2010 at 10:06 PM
Andrew Tyndall wrote: "As for the fiscal stimulus, there is no way to interpret Tuesday's results except as a repudiation of Keynesian demand-side pump priming. "
A recent poll showed that 40% of voters still wrongly believed that there are "death panels" in the health care reform law while another poll showed that a majority wrongly believe that Obama raised their taxes when he actually included a tax cut in the stimulus bill.
Given the appallingly low level of voter knowledge shown by those polls, it's just not credible to say voters were making an educated choice between supply side and Keynesian economics. The economy is bad and the voters expressed their dissatisfaction with the party that happened to be in power which this time was the Obama and the Democrats. In 1982, it was supply-sider Ronald Reagan and the Republicans who incurred the wrath of the voters. It's as simple as that. Deep thinking on economic theory, or any thinking at all, had little to do with voters' decisions in either case.
#12 Posted by L. Fleming, CJR on Sun 7 Nov 2010 at 07:23 PM
Andrew Tyndall wrote: "As for the fiscal stimulus, there is no way to interpret Tuesday's results except as a repudiation of Keynesian demand-side pump priming. "
A recent poll showed that 40% of voters still wrongly believed that there are "death panels" in the health care reform law while another poll showed that a majority wrongly believe that Obama raised their taxes when he actually included a tax cut in the stimulus bill.
Given the appallingly low level of voter knowledge shown by those polls, it's just not credible to say voters were making an educated choice between supply side and Keynesian economics. The economy is bad and the voters expressed their dissatisfaction with the party that happened to be in power which this time was the Obama and the Democrats. In 1982, it was supply-sider Ronald Reagan and the Republicans who incurred the wrath of the voters. It's as simple as that. Deep thinking on economic theory, or any thinking at all, had little to do with voters' decisions in either case.
#13 Posted by L. Fleming, CJR on Sun 7 Nov 2010 at 07:24 PM
As a follow-up to L. Fleming's comment, this is an area - the public's low intelligence about political issues - that Democrats should approach with some wariness, for all their ostentation about how smart they are compared to Republicans. Pew and other pollsters find repeatedly that the best-informed voters tend to be older, whiter, and more male than the average, and this is not a Democratic demographic. Much is made of Obama's following among 'the young', for example - but younger eligible voters are notoriously shallow when it comes to knowledge of government and politics, and (as we recently have seen) often don't bother to go to the polls. I heard much the same talk about the 'youth movement' in the late 1960s, and McGovern in 1972 did poll better among younger voters than overall. But by the 1980s those voters weren't young anymore, and they voted for Reagan.
The Democrats have the 'chattering classes' of media, academia, the arts, the legal profession, etc., it is true. But Republicans have the educated middle class that does other things besides obsess about politics and culture (McCain carried college graduates, as the GOP almost always does in presidential elections). Something obvious is staring journalists in the face, though they don't seem to work it into their narratives. The Democrats win both the richest and the poorest districts in the country; they win the districts most top-heavy with the intelligentsia from Berkeley to Cambridge, as well as the districts with the lowest graduation and literacy rates. The Republicans win the middle. It's an old story. It used to be said of an English writer that he 'idolized the aristocracy, despised the bourgeoisie, and regarded the lower classes as his own private brothel.' Not that much has changed - see any issue of Vanity Fair, for example.
#14 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Mon 8 Nov 2010 at 08:30 PM
First of, because the health care bill is comprehensive, people need to be polled on the parts they want removed and the parts they want enhanced. They don't want the mandate. They do want the elimination of rescission and preconditions. Again, if you want to measure how popular the bill is amongst a sizable population, you can look at Massachusetts who's had the model for Obama's program in place for 5 years.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/2008-releases/hsph-bcbs-poll-strong-support-for-ma-health-reform-law.html
Second, "The jobs numbers are pure estimates. The CBO also used the same model that said unemployment wouldn't rise above 8%, which was wrong."
No, the CBO did not. Obama's economic team, Christine Romer to be exact, did.
http://campaign.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jul/13/george-will/will-obama-said-stimulus-would-cap-unemployment-8-/
And that was while she was under pressure by Larry Summers to low ball her estimates of required stimulus.
#15 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 9 Nov 2010 at 04:53 AM
From here:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/12/091012fa_fact_lizza
"At the December meeting, it was Romer’s job to explain just how bad the economy was likely to get. “David Axelrod said we have to have a ‘holy-shit moment,’ ” she began. “Well, Mr. President, this is your ‘holy-shit moment.’ It’s worse than we thought.” She gave a short tutorial about what happens to an economy during a depression, what happened during previous severe recessions, and what could happen if the Administration didn’t act. She showed PowerPoint slides emphasizing that the situation would require a bold government response. The purpose of a stimulus is to fill the hole left during a recession by the difference between the economy’s potential and what it’s actually producing—what economists call the “output gap.” She explained the impact of different types of stimulus, giving a lesson on “fiscal multipliers”—the term economists use to describe the economic impact of every dollar of stimulus. For instance, she explained, a dollar of government spending raised the G.D.P. by about a dollar fifty, while every dollar of tax cuts, which are partially saved, generally returned about a dollar or less.
Axelrod told me, “The basic message was that, if we didn’t act quickly to replace the output we were losing, unemployment could skyrocket.” Romer mentioned that employers had dropped more than half a million workers from the payrolls in November, the biggest cut in more than three decades. “The conditions are grim, and deteriorating rapidly,” she told the President.
The most important question facing Obama that day was how large the stimulus should be. Since the election, as the economy continued to worsen, the consensus among economists kept rising. A hundred-billion-dollar stimulus had seemed prudent earlier in the year. Congress now appeared receptive to something on the order of five hundred billion. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate, was calling for a trillion. Romer had run simulations of the effects of stimulus packages of varying sizes: six hundred billion dollars, eight hundred billion dollars, and $1.2 trillion. The best estimate for the output gap was some two trillion dollars over 2009 and 2010. Because of the multiplier effect, filling that gap didn’t require two trillion dollars of government spending, but Romer’s analysis, deeply informed by her work on the Depression, suggested that the package should probably be more than $1.2 trillion. The memo to Obama, however, detailed only two packages: a five-hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar stimulus and an eight-hundred-and-ninety-billion-dollar stimulus. Summers did not include Romer’s $1.2-trillion projection. The memo argued that the stimulus should not be used to fill the entire output gap; rather, it was “an insurance package against catastrophic failure.” At the meeting, according to one participant, “there was no serious discussion to going above a trillion dollars.”
There were sound arguments why the $1.2-trillion figure was too high. First, Emanuel and the legislative-affairs team thought that it would be impossible to move legislation of that size, and dismissed the idea out of hand. Congress was “a big constraint,” Axelrod said. “If we asked for $1.2 trillion, it probably would have created such a case of sticker shock that the system would have locked up there.” He pointed east, toward Capitol Hill. “And the world was watching us, the market was watching us. If we failed to produce a stimulus bill, that in and of itself could have had deleterious effects.”
There was also a mechanical argument against a stimulus of that size. Peter Orszag, who was celebrating his fortieth birthday that day, said that, while the argument for a bigger stimulus was sound theoretically, there were limits to how much money the government could practically spend in the near future.
#16 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 9 Nov 2010 at 05:20 AM
A quick comment on a nugget from Spud:
"The jobs numbers are pure estimates. The CBO also used the same model that said unemployment wouldn't rise above 8%, which was wrong."
This is absolutely wrong. The 10% number came from the Council of Economic Advisers, not the CBO. It is silly to say the "same model was used" when the 10% number was a future prediction and the 2.5M jobs number was an evaluation of historical performance.
#17 Posted by Dave, CJR on Tue 23 Nov 2010 at 07:47 AM