Think it Through

If you read the news headlines on health care recently, you might get the impression that most people are more worried that President Obama will succeed in getting health care reform enacted than that he will fail.

The day after President Obama’s news conference last week, the Washington Post’s page one headline blared: “Obama seeks to calm fears on health care.” The New York Times interviewed people in one of the most Republican counties in the nation and concluded in a front page lede: “President Obama sought to convince an increasingly skeptical American public that proposed changes to the health care system would benefit them and strengthen the economy.”

Fears?

The headlines run contrary to the constant demand for health care reform that many of us have been hearing from people across the country for many years. In nearly every national poll over the last ten years , health care has been a top-tier concern. If you actually talk to people out in the country, health care concerns are on the top of their minds. Most Americans tell pollsters they are satisfied with the quality and accessibility of their own health care, but this does not mean they feel safe that things will stay that way. Scratch the surface of their satisfaction and you uncover fear that nothing is secure when it comes to health care: you hear stories of friends or relatives who have become destitute or have gone untreated for illnesses because they have lost health coverage somehow.

It is this insecurity that I believe is behind most polls showing clear majorities supporting President Obama’s efforts to change the way health care is delivered in the country. Our firm, Belden Russonello & Stewart, conducted a national survey last week to gauge if Americans really are worried about health care in the future.

The BRS national random digit dial survey of 800 adults, from July 20 to 24, found that:

• 72% of adults are worried that if someone in their family becomes seriously ill their health insurance might not cover enough of their medical bills. Nearly half the country — 47 % — is very worried about inadequate health coverage.
• 65% worry that if they lose or change jobs they might lose their health insurance and not be able to afford new health insurance. Again, close to one out of every two Americans — 46% — is very worried about losing health care.
• 60% say they worry that if someone in their family becomes seriously ill their health insurance might drop their coverage. 41% worry very much.
• 56% worry that if they lose or change jobs they might not be able to get new health insurance because of a pre-existing condition. Nearly four in ten –38% — worry about this very much.

When you consider that the June 2009 national survey by the AP/GfK reported 35% of Americans worry being victims of terrorism, you can easily conclude more Americans now fear their health insurance company than they do Osama Bin Laden.

The BRS poll last week also found that overall 62% of Americans favor President Obama’s efforts to create comprehensive changes in the health care system. About four in ten — 45% — feel strongly in favor. One in three (33%) Americans opposes what the president is trying to do.

Support for the plan reaches far beyond liberals and Democrats, as 65% of independents and 66% of political moderates favor what Obama is trying to do. A substantial 44% of each of these groups strongly supports his efforts.

One statistic from the BRS poll provides even more evidence that anxiety about the future rather than immediate concerns is driving support for comprehensive health care reform: younger Americans more firmly embrace comprehensive reform than their elders. Over two-thirds (67%) of Americans under 45 years old support Obama’s health care reform efforts, compared to 56% of those over 45. It is not just that Obama is more popular with young people. When you account for political affiliation and ideology, age is still an important consideration in support for reform.

This is why when I read headlines that say Americans fear health care reform, I am thinking, which Americans? Maybe reform is risky for some insurance company CEOs, some hospital big shots, and the Chamber of Commerce. For the rest of us, it is a matter of eliminating the risk of health care that may be out of reach in the future.

So far, President Obama has chosen not to use fear as a weapon to pass health care reform. As refreshing as this it is, Obama would benefit from at least reminding Americans of the insecurity they feel about the future of health care.

Update: full questionnaire here

It was Ronald Reagan who returned from a trip to South America and told reporters, “you can learn a lot by just listening.” I was reminded of Reagan’s revelation when an April Pew Research survey of the nation found that “the proportion saying that abortion should be legal in all or most cases has declined to 46% from 54% last August.” This finding took many of us by surprise because abortion attitudes have been incredibly stable over the last 15 years.

While it will take time to learn whether this shift becomes a trend and why it occurred, the change points out the importance of listening closely to the people who respond to your surveys. The commitment to listening closely led Belden Russonello & Stewart to change the way we measure opinions on abortion, to reflect more closely the questions people ask themselves about abortion.

For many years BRS measured abortion opinions by using a standard question that Pew asked in April and which is used by other media polls such as Washington Post/ABC News. The question is:

Thinking about abortion, do you think abortion should be legal in all cases, legal in most cases, illegal in most cases, or illegal in all cases?

Four years ago, we noticed that when our interviewers asked this abortion question, many respondents objected to the categories. They told us they did not think of abortion in terms of how widely illegal it should be, but rather how much we should limit abortion. There were many who could not say that abortion should be illegal most of the time, but rather that it should be legal with many restrictions. We changed our abortion question to read:

Thinking about abortion, do you think abortion should be legal in almost all cases, legal in most cases, legal in just a few cases, or never legal?

We placed both of the above questions on a survey in 2004, using a split sample, and found that the numbers at the extremes stayed about the same :

• legal in all cases (19%) and legal in almost all cases (19%);
• illegal in all cases (18%) and never legal (21%).

The middle positions shifted, however.

• The new language told us that 20% chose legal in most cases and 36% chose legal in just a few cases.
• The traditional version had it flipped: 28% saying illegal in most cases and 32% saying legal in most cases.

The traditional wording can be misleading because it suggests that abortion opinions are an either-or proposition, when in fact, they are on a continuum. The legal vs. illegal frame for the abortion question pushes pollsters and news people to collapse the first two categories vs. the second two categories, so you report so much support FOR abortion and so much support AGAINST abortion. As the Pew release stated: “Currently 46% say abortion should be legal in most cases (28%) or all cases (18%); 44% believe that abortion should be illegal in most (28%) or all cases (16%).” This leads people to think half the public is for abortion and half is against, when it is a lot more interesting than that.

Between 56 and 60 percent of Americans count themselves somewhere in the middle on abortion. Unlike other issues, such as global warming, school vouchers, or economic stimulus programs from the federal government, there is no muddled middle on abortion. Rather, we see a firmly-ambivalent, or comfortably-conflicted middle. From our own research we know that these are people who do not subscribe to an ideological pro-women’s rights or anti-abortion sentiment but rather have made a conscious decision to take a middle position because they believe the circumstances matter.

Thinking about abortion opinions in this way does not answer the question – what is the reason behind the shift in Pew’s numbers on abortion? It does suggest that the movement detected by Pew is not so much a drop in overall support for abortion but some kind of shift in opinions on restrictions of one type or another.

The Pew question leads me to three suggestions: 1) change the four-way question to reflect how the public approaches abortion, by not placing things in a strictly legal vs. illegal mode, 2) stop emphasizing the collapsed categories, so that the news media must report abortion opinions on a continuum, not one side versus the other side; and 3) look more closely at the people taking a middle position. They are a majority of Americans.

As Ronald Reagan would have put it, “you can learn a lot by just listening.”

The Republican message guru of the 80’s, and into the 90’s, Arthur Finkelstein of New York, built a successful career on one simple idea. If his candidate was trailing in the polls, he would call the opponent a liberal. His formula had two main advantages: simplicity and portability: FILL IN YOUR OPPONENT’S NAME HERE is too liberal for FILL IN YOUR STATE HERE. With this advice, he helped Republicans win many elections, because the liberal label meant favoring big government and higher taxes, being soft on crime, and social permissiveness.

Today you see these ads far less often. Even though the opinion polls have consistently shown almost no increase in the number of Americans who describe themselves as politically “liberal,” I believe there is solid evidence that the liberal bashing has lost its punch because over the last two decades Americans have gradually become more liberal. My conclusion derives from listening to hundreds of focus groups over the last two decades by our firm, Belden Russonello & Stewart, as well as an analysis of public opinion surveys. The latest Pew values survey describes the current phenomenon as a return to “centrism,” but whatever you call it, the move in public opinion is leftward. A look at public opinion polls on government, taxes, civil rights and gay rights supports what we have heard in focus groups.

More liberal on taxes and government

Perhaps nothing has separated liberals from conservatives more over the past several decades than attitudes towards taxes. The idea that government takes too much of our personal income is central to the conservative position in the country, and the liberal position has been that taxes pay for things we need, therefore we do not begrudge them.

The data over the last 15 years indicate a shift away from the conservative position on taxes. Since 1994, the proportions of Americans who think their federal income taxes are too high declined from 66% to 46%, according to Gallup. The Gallup polls also show that more Americans today than ten years ago think the income tax they pay is fair (51% in 1997 and 61% in 2009); and fewer think that “middle income people” are paying “too much” of federal taxes than thought so in the past (57% in 1994 compared to 43% in 2009).

Opinions about government generally track the difficulties of the nation. When the nation is troubled economically or because of a security threat, the public is more supportive of government action in general. When times are good overall, Americans tend to forget what government does for them and claim to be rugged individualists.

After 9/11 attacks, the public’s confidence in government to make the right decisions shot up to its highest level in decades.

When NORC’s General Social Survey asked Americans if the “government should do everything possible to improve the standard of living of all poor Americans,” or if they believe “it is not the government’s responsibility and everyone should take care of himself,” the numbers in favor of government help rose during the recession of 1990 and ‘91, then dipped until 2000, when they shot back up and stayed up.

These and other surveys indicate an increasing openness to government helping people in need and a public that is stepping away from the taxophobia that fueled the Reagan revolution.

More liberal on crime

A look at the public opinion data on crime adds fuel to the idea that Americans are becoming more progressive. Several polls show that the death penalty is becoming less popular, and that more Americans believe the government should spend more money attacking the causes of crime than on law enforcement through more prisons, police and judges. Also, several polls have shown that although legalizing marijuana still is rejected by a majority of Americans, support for legalization has grown in the past few years.

More liberal on rights

Perhaps the largest shift leftward in public opinion on liberal-conservative issues over the last 15 years has been the rise in support of individuals’ exercising their rights and the growing tolerance for people who are different. Gay rights are the most dramatic, but not the only example of this increased tolerance. Gallup studies show that from 1996 to the present, Americans have moved steadily in favor of calling “homosexuality” an “acceptable alternative life style” (44% in 1996, 57% in 2009), as well as more in favor of “marriage between same sex couples being recognized by the law as valid with the same rights as traditional marriages” (27% in 1996, 40% in 2009).

Our own BRS polls for the ACLU have shown that a majority of Americans now support a “gay or lesbian couple” being able to adopt a baby legally (46% in 1998, 53% in 2007).

Also, ABC News/Washington Post surveys have indicated a 31-point rise from 1993 to 2009 in the belief that “homosexuals who do publicly disclose their sexual orientation should be allowed to serve in the military.” (44% in 1993, 75% this year)

Beyond gay rights, a general question about individual rights, which BRS has asked since 1998, shows a slight but steady rise in the number of Americans who think “generally, in this country we do not go far enough “to protect liberties and rights (from 31% to 36%), ” and a corresponding drop (from 29% to 24%) who think we “go too far” to protect rights.

The policies of President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney catapulted civil liberties to the front burner of American politics in the same way that Reagan and his interior secretary James Watt built widespread national support for environmental causes. A public that had been previously asleep to threats of civil liberties now has been awakened by government action on Guantanamo, incarceration of people indefinitely without showing evidence, illegal wiretapping, etc. A recent BRS poll reveals that “protecting civil liberties and the Constitution” rates near the top of the public’s issue concerns, just below the economy and the war in Iraq, at the same level as protecting the country from terrorists, and ahead of health care reform and improving education.

Conclusion

The data on individual rights, government, taxes, and crime do not offer a complete picture of how Americans think about these issues, but taken together they add credence to the idea that the American public opinion is moving gradually to the left in many ways. How far we do not know. It is likely, however, that the trend will continue.

Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Center for People and the Press, astutely points out that much of the turn leftward on issues such as gay rights is due to cohort replacement: the younger generations hold more liberal views than their elders, and as the older generations disappear, they will be replaced by their more liberal children and grandchildren.

It may be hard to imagine now, but some day soon a media consultant will make his or her name with the following formula: FILL IN YOUR OPPONENT’S NAME HERE is too conservative for FILL IN YOUR STATE HERE.

Having just returned from a blog-free, almost e-mail free three weeks in Umbria, Italy I have learned that the President named Sonia Sotomayor as his choice to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court, and that the Republicans in the Senate and elsewhere are making noises about opposing her on the grounds that she is too Hispanic.

Sotomayor’s critics start by admitting that she is “qualified.” She has a law degree from Yale University, was appointed to the federal district court by Republican President Bush in 1991, then elevated to an appeals court judgeship by President Clinton in 1998. Her critics argue that being qualified is not enough. They question her judgment, because she would see the law through the eyes of a Puerto Rican woman from New York City. Essentially she is too Hispanic-urban-northeastern-female.

The nominee’s critics would have a legitimate point if her record showed that her personal opinion caused her to mangle the Constitution and distort the law. But if that were true, they would be making the case that she is unqualified. Judge Robert Bork had a distinguished career as a federal judge and legal scholar before the Senate decided he was unfit to serve on the Supreme Court. In the 1989 debate, the Senators stated that Bork’s views of the Constitution were so out of the mainstream as to make him unqualified to sit on the Supreme Court. The Senate did not say “he was qualified, but…”

This issue of qualifications is not merely one of semantics; it goes to the heart of the debate over Supreme Court nominees. During the debates over the nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito the Republican Administration did an outstanding job creating the assumption that a Supreme Court nominee is qualified if he or she meets the following criteria: attended a reputable law school, has had experience as judge, looks good in a blue suit, has a loving family to sit in the front row at the hearings, and does not have a criminal record.

The Senate Democrats, including Senator Obama, went along with this definition. This led some Senators, like Obama, to oppose someone they believed was qualified. The National Journal quotes Obama’s Senate remarks on the Roberts nomination: “I have no doubt in my mind Judge Roberts is qualified to sit on the highest court in the land. …. The problem I had is when I examined Judge Roberts’ record and history of public service , it is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak.”

The narrow definition of qualifications to be a Supreme Court judge is a mistake. It also contradicts public opinion. Research that our firm, Belden Russonello & Stewart, has conducted, indicates Americans would expand the definition of qualified to mean that the nominee’s views on the Constitution are in keeping with our traditions and laws and norms of the day.

In the case of Sam Alito, his consistent rulings which ignored precedent and facts to side with institutions of authority over claims of individual rights placed him at odds with the framers of our Constitution. I would argue that John Roberts’ qualifications were unknown because he refused to hand over all of his legal opinions when he worked at the Justice Department for President Reagan.

I cannot remember any Senator claiming Roberts was unfit for the Supreme Court because of his midwesterness, or that Alito was too Italian — although I could offer plenty of pros and cons on the latter, based my own Italian-American upbringing a few miles away from Alito’s in Essex County, New Jersey.

Sotomayor’s ethnicity can only be a plus on the Supreme Court, which needs the Constitution to be interpreted by people who know the law and know our country.

The public has it right. We should have a broader definition of qualifications, and from what we know about Sonia Sotomayor, she certainly seems to pass that test.

Piece by piece, whether it is securities, antitrust, taxes, or the federal government’s willingness to help people overcome financial difficulties, President Obama is dismantling the structure of the Reagan revolution. Obama is doing this with the same intensity, scope, and support among the public that President Reagan had when he tore down much of the foundations of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society programs.

After a weaker version of Obama’s legislation to bring back some consumer protections for credit card holders passed the House of Representatives last week, the Senate has started to consider a tougher version. Although it is far from a sure thing that they will pass anything meaningful, the fact that Congress is addressing this issue at all is revolutionary. For the past three decades Democrats and Republicans have worked at the favor of the banks and credit card companies to strip away consumer protections against predatory lenders. This played to the melody of deregulation – a tune that government began to play first under President Carter but which became so popular it was practically a national anthem under Reagan.

At the same time that Congress loosened regulations on banks and other lenders, the companies began to increase substantially their marketing efforts: Visa began telling us “It’s everwhere you want to be,” Mastercard said spending money was “priceless,” and so on. Since then, we have seen millions of Americans weighed down with debt from which they can never fully recover. No one challenged the laws because we were told that if you fall behind on your payments it was entirely your fault. You were irresponsible. It took years for people to catch on that in many cases it was the lender who was irresponsible.

In 2006, the non-profit organization Americans For Fairness in Lending, asked our firm, Belden Russonello & Stewart, to help it figure out how to educate the public about the problems with the lending laws. They wanted to tell the story of the harm caused by hidden late fees, fine print that hides outrageously high interest rates, and other chicanery that falls under the heading of predatory lending.

We conducted a number of focus groups in Chicago, and I can remember coming away surprised, saddened, and inspired by what people told us.

I was surprised because of the familiarity with predatory lending practices from the average middle class people in the focus groups. I had figured that nobody would know what I was talking about when I introduced the topic, but instead people spoke up, citing instances of people who had been hurt by zero money down for car loans that turned out to include unpayable interest, payday storefronts, credit card misrepresentations that sunk people they knew, especially college students, and mortgages where expanding rates and penalty payments were concealed. We only had to mention the topic and we heard of flood of complaints.

I was saddened because most of these people who were aware of the practices believed that there was nothing they could do about them. Their response, as we used to say in Newark, New Jersey, “whaddaya gonna do?”

Finally, I was inspired by how a little information about the history of these practices could transform their resignation into indignation and the desire to speak up and get involved to change things. When they heard that before the 1980’s we had protections against most of the consumer traps they cited, they were stunned. Why can’t we go back to more sensible rules, they asked? Three years later, their collective response has caught the ear of the Congress and the president.

How strongly the Congress remakes the credit laws will be a test of how well lawmakers have listened to these people. In a larger sense it will also test how far President Obama can take us down the path of undoing the Reagan revolution and bringing balance back to our laws.

Senator Arlen Specter, the former headline-chasing prosecutor from Philadelphia turned United States Senator from Pennsylvania is known as a loner in a club that values camaraderie above all else. But now Senator Specter has joined the largest political movement in the country in the last 12 months, the exodus from the Republican Party. According to all the recent national polls, from April 2008 to April 2009 over 17 million Americans left the Republican party. Specter makes it 17 million plus one.

How many have joined the Democrats? There has been no net increase in those calling themselves Democrats, according to most of the national surveys. Democratic identification, depending on which poll you use, has either remained the same or even decreased slightly since last April.

Instead, the shrinking of the Republican party has coincided with the largest number of Americans identifying as independents – between 85 and 88 million Americans (38 to 40%), depending on the poll – in a generation. Republican identification stands at 20 to 21% (about 42 million Americans) and Democratic i.d. is at 35% in most polls (about 75 million Americans).

from Washington Post/ABC News data

Where has the exodus been most robust? A look at some of our surveys at Belden Russonello & Stewart from April 2008 to April 2009 yields some surprises: men under age 50, college graduates, and single people have been the most likely groups to bolt from the Republican party in the last 12 months.

For now, these Republican defectors are calling themselves independents – a group in which a majority approve of the way President Obama is handling his job.

When Senator Specter voted for the President’s stimulus bill, we should have known what was coming. By voting yes, Specter tore at the fabric of current Republican doctrine and joined the millions of Americans who have placed their faith in the country’s new President and his new leadership. An important part of that leadership includes a willingness to expand the role of government to repair the economy.

Specter’s vote for the stimulus bill and his decision to leave the GOP is all the more meaningful when you consider the fact that he holds the seat of former Senator Richard Schweiker, a liberal Republican from Pennsylvania who served in the Senate from 1968 to 1980. Schweiker achieved national prominence in 1976 when Ronald Reagan, in his first unsuccessful race for President, announced his intention to name Schweiker as his vice presidential running mate at the Republican convention. Conservatives were outraged. President Ford edged out Reagan for the nomination, and that was the end of Schweiker’s dance with national office. After becoming President, Reagan named Schweiker Secretary of Health and Human Services in 1981.

That was when the Republican party lived in a considerably larger tent, when it was ideological but not inflexible, national rather than regional. It was a time when Mr. Conservative Ronald Reagan saw value in choosing Mr. Liberal Richard Schweiker as a running mate on the Republican ticket.

Today, seventy percent of Republicans call themselves conservative and over four in ten live in the South, according to BRS surveys. Today, Schweiker, like Specter, would be part of that 17 million person movement that is growing in America.

When progressive groups fail to challenge what they oppose in Congress because they think the other side is too big, has too much money, or has already won the public opinion war, they should take a lesson from Friends of the Earth [FOE] this past week.

Working in a coalition with like-minded groups, little FOE defeated the large nuclear industry lobby by killing the proposed $50 billion loan guarantee to the nuclear industry that was in the stimulus bill. FOE succeeded because it had confidence in its cause, courage to communicate a clear and consistent message based on values and information, and a team that could create a lot of impact with a small amount of resources.

When FOE got wind that Utah Sen. Bob Bennett was pushing for $50 billion for loan guarantees for “innovative low-carbon producing energy technology” the group went into action. Everyone knew the money was for the nuclear power industry to start building new nuclear reactors around the country, since other forms of low-carbon producing energy – wind, solar, biomass, etc—are attracting enough private investment that they are not seeking government loan guarantees as is the nuclear industry.

The nuclear industry — or as the Senate would have you call it, the “innovative low-carbon energy technology industry” – is the primary recipient of “loan guarantees” which means if a new nuclear reactor project fails to break even, taxpayer dollars pay back the investors in the project. This way, if you invest in nuclear reactors and they make money, you make a profit. If the reactors go bust, you get paid back by the taxpayers. Private investors make the profits, taxpayers take all the risk. This unfortunate situation is made worse by a Congressional Budget Office report that predicts a 50% default rate on new nuclear reactors. Any way you look at it, it spells BAIL OUT. It is another sad but common Washington story of a self-proclaimed fiscally conservative Senator (in this case Bennett) seeking a $50 billion bailout for a specific industry (nuclear).

FOE simply informed the people of Senator Bennett’s state of these facts, via some very effective television advertising in Utah. It also reached out to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s constituents with on-line advertising. The message: Do not give the give a $50 billion bailout for the nuclear industry to try to build new nuclear reactors across the country when we have alternatives that are cheaper, safer, and cleaner.
(Full disclosure here: The ads were created by Wild Bunch media and informed by message research produced by Belden Russonello & Stewart for FOE.)

After Sen. Bennett heard an earful from true conservatives in his state he felt it was not worth the effort, and he dropped the proposal from the stimulus bill.

Here is the irony: The nuclear industry spends millions of dollars in lobbying and campaign contributions in order to try to win billions in federal subsidies, and they are defeated by FOE which spent $10,000 on media to inform the public what was going on.

There is a lesson here about courage of conviction, determination, and message discipline.

Like the Bill Murray character in the movie What About Bob, who is so immobilized by fear that he cannot move forward, the U.S. Senate took a “baby step” yesterday toward becoming a functioning institution which actually represents the hopes and needs of the rest of the country. The Senate passed a law providing health insurance to about 11 million low-income children who have not had access to affordable health care.

Last year the bill, known as SCHIP, died after two Bush vetoes and Republican opposition. This year, more Democrats in the Senate and House were able to expand SCHIP, but not before some Republicans tried to defeat it by raising the specter of immigrants using services. The Republicans objected to giving health care coverage to immigrant children whose parents are legal residents of the United States, who live and work in our communities and pay taxes.

One of the most contentious changes in SCHIP, and an improvement over the bill Bush vetoed, is the elimination of the current requirement that children of immigrants who are here legally wait five years before being included. Five years may seem like a flash to a U.S. Senator – just barely enough time to raise the $15 million+ needed for the next reelection campaign.

But five years is a lifetime to a child. That is exactly the phrase average Americans told BRS researchers in focus groups we conducted across the country for the National Immigration Law Center. When given the chance to think it through, the voters we heard from believe children should not suffer for a situation they did not cause.

Armed with the righteousness of their cause and that simple phrase – five years is a lifetime to a child– SCHIP coalition advocates won their case on Capitol Hill and persuaded them to include legal immigrant children. The president will sign this bill and the Senate will have done some good. Baby steps.

The dollar may be falling against the Euro, but it still has purchasing power in Illinois politics.

That is the view of the Illinois public according to a new statewide poll by Belden Russonello & Stewart for the Joyce Foundation. We find Illinois residents are fed up with what they perceive as widespread political corruption in the state, stemming from too much influence of money in politics. The next few months will be a good test to see whether voter disgust can fuel efforts by reform groups to devalue the dollar in Illinois politics.

image used under CC license from Tracy Olson