My first opinion poll!

Last updated on: October 8, 2013 at 8:29 am by Jane the Actuary

My first opinion poll! 2013-10-08T08:29:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Well, I’m sure I’ve been called at some point in the past with election-specific questions, but this was the first time I was asked whether I approve or disapprove of Obama and the House Republicans. Wow – was this a long poll.

The first thing I learned is the context behind the “Americans don’t know the difference between the Affordable Care Act and Obmamcare” assertion. At some point midway through the poll I was asked to rate, on a scale of 0 to 100, various people, laws, groups, etc. The ACA was there, then Obama, Boehner, the NRA, right-to-life groups, and then Obamacare – and I certainly didn’t remember exactly how I’d rated the ACA by the time she got to Obamacare. (Yes, in hindsight, I could have said, “didn’t you already ask about that? Can you tell me what I said previously?” but I assumed that the questions/responses didn’t stay on her screen after she input them.

There were also a long series of questions along the lines of “If I told you X, how would it change your opinion of the Healthcare Reform Act/Affordable Care Act/ObamaCare” — with the list of items being things like “insurance companies have to act like insurance companies and not charge you more when you get sick or get older,” “provides free contraception,” “requires insurance companies to cover maternity and reproductive health care,” etc. And there was a list of “will X component impact you directly negatively, positively or not at all” — for which I felt compelled to say “not at all” for most of them because, having insurance through my employer, I’m insulated from most such impacts — though I did tell her that the free contraception would be a negative impact (because that will increase our health insurance premiums — both the portion our family pays directly and the portion the employer pays, which sucks up an increasing portion of the benefits/compensation dollar). I suppose I could have said “negatively” for all of these, insofar as each goodie drives up the cost, which drives up the subsidies, which increases taxes on the rest of us directly or indirectly. But in a way, this is the sort of thing where the “right” answer isn’t an objective thing. How will this poll be used and interpreted by pundits, politicians, academics?

There were also what I imagine to be fairly standard questions of “if the next election were held today, who would you vote for?” at the congressional level and more generically, and “who did you vote for in the past?” And my identification of myself as a “Republican” but not a “strong” Republican might seem incongruous with my party-line answers, but it’s hard to express in a poll the fact that Republicans are doing a stinky job (for instance, as I’ve said multiple times on this blog, failing to come up with an effective “replace” option for ObamaCare and in the current debate, having an ever-shifting list of demands).

And the very last question was asking for my first name “for verification purposes” — which I’m guessing means that the woman did not have this information in front of her, and a database would determine whether there really was a “Jane” in the household so as to do a cross-check to confirm that she wasn’t making up these responses for lack of an individual willing to respond. And they tried three times — the first two were during the day and I ignored them — so I don’t know if this says they’re desperate for respondants or just that when a computer pulls your name, they throw it in the rotation multiple times.

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