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Wednesday, August 05, 2009

The Silent Majority

supports health care reform.

First 50% support "Barack Obama's plan to reform health care."

Second solid majorities support every component of the House plans
(including soaking the rich to pay for reform). The difference between the solid majority for each and every component of reform and the not so solid majority for the reform plan is clearly based on uncertainty or misinformation about the plan. It is not just the usual pattern that people oppose public spending but support spending on each and every program. This is clear, because there is solid support for one of the funding options, in response to a question which definitely stresses the cost side of the cost benefit calculation.

The vast majority of US citizens support universal health insurance *and* support the taxes and mandates which will be required to achieve it.

However, a very noisy minority has been shouting down reform supporting congressmen when they try to talk to their constituents.

Clearly this is a case in which the silent majority is on one side and the noisy minority on another.

So far I haven't detected another liberal using the phrase "silent majority." It is entirely accurate appropriate and (I suspect) effective. However, it takes more than that to make most liberals quote Richard Nixon.

Am I the first to overcome this crippling atavistic revulsion ? If not provide a link with your comment.

Also I have nothing against dogs named checkers.

update: not the first. No more mister nice blog was not nice to me.

"we'll be the peaceful Silent Majority this time."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are committing the fallacy of composition. Keep your politics off this blog - it's one of the reasons that I like it.

Robert said...

huh ? This blog is mostly an expression of my political views.

Hmm fallacy of composition (since it is true of all of the parts it is true of the whole). Yes it is possible that a majority support each major component of the house bills, but no one supports all of the components.

Lets say each says no to one of 5 components, then 80% support for each. If however each very strongly opposes that one component, then each might oppose the whole bill. So there could be 80% support for each of 5 major components and 0 support for the whole bill.

The pollsters can do cross tabs. I would say that someone who declares support for each component of the bill (note I have dropped the word "main") has declared support for the bill (in theory one might imagine they don't work well together but in the actual interview it is clear by the last questions on components that they are all together).

I'm sure in my heart that this happened, but I don't have the cross tabs.