One of the things that’s been baffling about the health-care debate is how the president and Democrats’ approval has been plummeting — and specifically due to their handling of the health-care issue. Despite this, liberal health-care advocates have been trumpeting polls that show wide support for the most controversial aspect of the plan, the government-run “public option.” I have a piece up on the home page where I unpack this mystery a bit:

In June, the New York Times set the tone for health-care-poll coverage with the headline “In Poll, Wide Support for Government-Run Health.” The poll found that 72 percent of respondents favored the public option. With every successive poll with a similar result, liberal outfits such as the Campaign for America’s Future have beat their chests with headlines such as “New Poll Shows Tremendous Support for Public Health Care Option.” Recently, liberal Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein urged Democratic lawmakers to “Listen to the Polls” and wrote that opposition to a government-run health-care option is “resolutely, aggressively, anti-democratic.” And just this past Friday, another Washington Post blogger, Greg Sargent, ran a story called “White House Polling Memo Omits Numbers Showing Support For Public Option.”
It’s rather hard to reconcile this interpretation of the polls with the political unpopularity of the Democrats’ handing of the issue. Rather than consider the data’s limitations, however, liberal health-care-reform advocates have reacted like chimpanzees who’ve been shown simple conjuring tricks. It’s beyond their comprehension that they could be losing the debate.
The problem is that these polls ask the wrong thing. The relevant question is not, “Do you support the ‘public option’?” but rather, “What is the ‘public option’?”
After months of fruitless White House and Democratic campaigning, a polling firm has finally done a rudimentary test of what the public knows about the health-reform debate. Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates released a poll last week that ought to undermine any confidence Democrats might have about enjoying a “mandate” for health reform. The survey of a thousand adults found that, given a choice of three plausible-sounding definitions, only 37 percent of the public could correctly identify what the “public option” is. “That’s nearly the equivalent probability that one would expect if everyone were just guessing,” according to the poll (a random pick between three options, of course, gives a 33 percent chance of success).