Black Voters and the ‘Left-Wing Revolt’

It’s a bit off my beat, but Ronald Brownstein nails something important in this piece about the reservoir of support for health care reform — any kind of health care reform — from minority voters.

Minorities don’t seem to have much doubt about their investment in this debate. In November’s Kaiser Family Foundation health care tracking poll, two-thirds of non-white Americans said that their family would be better off if health care reform passes. Though the evidence suggests that non-college whites could also receive a disproportionate share of the bill’s spending (since they constitute more of the uninsured), they are dubious: just one-third of them believe they would be better off, a reflection of the mounting skepticism about government such blue-collar whites are expressing across the board. Minorities don’t seem to have much doubt about their investment in this debate. In November’s Kaiser Family Foundation health care tracking poll, two-thirds of non-white Americans said that their family would be better off if health care reform passes. Though the evidence suggests that non-college whites could also receive a disproportionate share of the bill’s spending (since they constitute more of the uninsured), they are dubious: just one-third of them believe they would be better off, a reflection of the mounting skepticism about government such blue-collar whites are expressing across the board. Yet the most skeptical group is the college-educated whites, the same constituency that has the most access to health insurance today: only about one-fourth of them expect to be better off under reform.

A plugged-in Virginia Democratic strategist told me, after Creigh Deeds’s bumbling gubernatorial campaign came to an end, that there was a tide shift when Deeds appeared to say he would opt the state out of a public option if it passed the Senate. Black voters, especially, wanted health care to pass — it made it tougher to get them out to vote for Deeds when he said that.