Poll Watch: What's important and what's not

From Rasmussen Reports, seventy five percent of those surveyed want to see changes to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, or The Job-Killing Health Care Law Act, as it’s referred to by the Reps in the House), while only 18% want to leave it alone.  But among the ‘change it’ population, 20% say repeal it and do nothing, 28% say repeal it but keep the popular stuff, and 27% say don’t repeal it, just get rid of the stuff they don’t like.  So, that sums it up pretty well, don't you think?   True to form, the majority want the good stuff and are not interested in the hard stuff.

Over at Pew Research, Americans of all political persuasions believe the President ‘stands up for what he believes in’ – 77% overall believe this to be the case, and that includes Reps (67%) and Independents (79%), as well as Dems (89%).  His job approval ratings continue to be less than stellar (46%) but fairly consistent.   More interesting from this survey was a question asking respondents to describe the Tea Party in one word. No prompting, just one word.  In April of last year, the five words most mentioned were: great, interesting, patriotic, good, and ridiculous.  Nine months later, the five words most mentioned were: good, radical, crazy, OK, and ridiculous.  Hmm… is this another ugly baby? And last from this study, only 34% of those surveyed approve of the new GOP leadership’s agenda, while 43% disapprove. 

That segues nicely to a recent Gallup poll, which finds that Americans are very focused on domestic issues. Among the issues considered ‘extremely important’ or ‘extremely important/very important’, the economy is first and health care is sixth. Two through five? Unemployment, the deficit, corruption, and education.  And while the House has determined that the ‘Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act’ is the single most important thing they have to tackle, only 33% of their own party rate this as extremely important; rather, Republicans seem to be focused on the economy, the deficit, government corruption, unemployment, terrorism, and illegal immigration, all of which scored higher on this question than health care.

Go figure.