New York Times/CBS Health Care Poll June 12-16th

A recent New York Times/CBS Health Care Poll (June 12-16th) has gotten a lot of attention by the rest of the media as well as President Obama. At his press conference on Tuesday, even President Obama referenced a new New York Times/CBS survey showing that 77 percent of Americans “are satisfied with the health insurance that they currently have.” Unfortunately, the data won’t be available to others to make the comparisons provided in my own work for some months. The key result is: "Wide Support for Government-Run Health."

Well, the survey heavily over represents Obama supporters. While Obama got 52.9 percent of the vote and McCain got 45.6 percent in the 2008 general election, this survey implies that Obama beat McCain by about a 2-to-1 margin (see page 7):

In the 2008 presidential election, "did you vote for Barack Obama, John McCain, or someone else?"

Obama 48%
McCain 25%
Someone else 1%
Wouldn't say 5%
Didn't vote 19%

Page 9 reports:

Generally speaking, do you usually consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or what?

Rep 24%
Dem 38%
Ind 31%
DK/NA 8%

My own view of this is that it greatly over samples Democrats and liberals. Possibly if they got only Obama supporters they could have gotten more support for higher taxes and government-run health care.