Americans Sour on U.S. Healthcare Quality

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For the first time in Gallup’s two-decade trend, less than half of Americans are complimentary about the quality of U.S. healthcare, with 48% rating it “excellent” or “good.” The slight majority now rate healthcare quality as subpar, including 31% saying it is “only fair” and 21% — a new high — calling it “poor.” …

Americans’ evaluations of the quality of healthcare they personally receive are also at a low ebb — albeit higher than their U.S. rating — with 72% giving it excellent or good marks. CONTINUED

Lydia Saad, Gallup

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In elections, a win is a win. And Republicans won

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… Republicans won the House, after just four years, but with a thin margin. Voters, especially independents, were motivated by economic issues, their unhappiness with the direction of the country and President Joe Biden’s leadership, and they wanted solutions. But a poor Republican economic campaign message, focused on attacking Pelosi and Biden without offering solutions, was problematic, as was candidate quality, especially in the Senate races, and they did not want a return of Trump dominance in Washington.

This conclusion is based on The Winston Group’s “Post-election Analysis: It’s the Year of the Independent,” released this week, in which we spent two months dissecting the Edison Research exit poll data and analyzing our Winning the Issues post-election research, along with other data. Unlike what most partisan pundits and politicos and media commentators would have you believe, the “root causes” of the Republicans’ disappointing outcome weren’t mail-in ballots, abortion or voter concern about threats to democracy, though those issues were important to some.

There is a difference between important issues and determinative factors in elections. Here are some of the key takeaways that help explain the Republicans’ win in the House — albeit not a “red wave” — and loss in the Senate. CONTINUED

David Winston (Winston Group), Roll Call

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Two-thirds of Americans — including most Dems — favor investigation into Biden docs

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A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll finds that nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults (64%) favor Congress “investigating the classified documents found at [President] Biden’s home and post-vice-presidential office” — including a majority of Democrats (52%). Just 16% of Americans — and 27% of Democrats — oppose such an investigation. …

According to the Yahoo News/YouGov poll, this may be — for now — the most popular of the many investigations House Republicans have vowed to launch now that they hold subpoena power. CONTINUED

Andrew Romano, Yahoo News

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What Even Are the Suburbs Nowadays, Anyway?

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An underappreciated challenge of the present era in American politics—a challenge for policymakers, for candidates and their staffs, for pollsters, for journalists—is defining what now counts as “suburban.” Over the last half-century, suburban voters came to be recognized as a bloc distinct from urban and rural voters. By the 1992 presidential election, suburban voters were casting more votes than urban and rural voters combined.

But across those decades, the nature of the suburbs evolved. What we nowadays call suburbs look very different from place to place: The older suburbia of the Northeast is quite different from the newer suburbia surrounding cities in the West. We should not assume that the dynamics of age and race and income levels in the populations living in cul-de-sac-ville across the country are identical. CONTINUED

Daniel McGraw, The Bulwark

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2023 Edelman Trust Barometer: Navigating a Polarized World

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2022 was supposed to have been the year when the world emerged from the pandemic, with a promised return to normal life and an economic boom. Instead, we got an unprecedented Russian invasion of Ukraine, spiraling commodity prices, greater global food insecurity, skyrocketing interest rates, continued climate shocks, strict Covid lockdowns in China and a retreat from globalization due to geopolitical risks. This triggered a cost-of-living crisis among the lower- and even the middle-class worldwide.

In the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer, we see how these macro pressures manifest at an individual level in a set of fears ranging from inflation to nuclear war. These sit on top of pre-existing worries about job losses to automation and the impact of climate change. The consequence is a descent from distrust to acute polarization in society. Without intervention, we will see a continued move from a crisis of institutional trust to a crisis of interpersonal trust. CONTINUED

Richard Edelman

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Why Black voters are more important in Georgia than in any other state

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The current list of swing states in American politics mostly features places where Black voters don’t play an outsize role – states such as Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin. Even in swing states where Black voters make up at least 10% of the voting public (e.g., Michigan and Pennsylvania), the Black portion of the electorate in the 2020 election was comparable to what it was nationwide (12%).

Georgia is the big exception. According to US Census data, 33% of 2020 presidential election voters in the state were Black. That ranked second nationally behind deep-red Mississippi. …

Not only that, but the Black portion of the electorate is growing in Georgia as their percentage of the population has risen. State records show that Black adults made up 23% of voters in the 2000 election – which indicates a 6-point increase in the Black portion of the presidential electorate (whose race was known) from 2000 to 2020. CONTINUED

Harry Enten, CNN

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