Can the Democratic Party Capture Formerly Uninsured Voters?

The biggest political reason for health reform is the Democrats' base. Leaders will be relying on the bill's passage to reenergize many of the voters—and prevent a disastrous erosion of support among young voters. How well that works will become clear in November and, probably, again in 2012. As fellow Gaggler Katie points out, there's good news for Dems on that front. It looks like the the so-called enthusiasm gap has closed between Republican voters, who have been motivated en masse by the tea-party movement and opposition to the bill, and Democratic voters, who were put off by the slow pace of reform.

What's less clear is whether the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will help to draw more voters into the Democratic Party. Many supporters of reform are middle-class, insured liberals who see reform as a social good. But will today's uninsured become tomorrow's insured Democrats? Many of them, as reform opponents have pointed out, are uninsured by choice—they're often young people who are not concerned about their health and don't want to spend the money. Perry Bacon reported in The Washington Post on Thursday that "it's unlikely that the efforts of President Obama and congressional Democrats will soon yield them a huge new base of enthusiastic supporters."

[I]n some ways, the uninsured are already part of the Obama coalition. Recent Washington Post-ABC News polls found 57 percent of the uninsured either favor or lean toward the Democratic Party, and 32 percent favor the GOP. A New York Times analysis last year showed the uninsured tend to live in states that vote Republican for president (27 percent of people in Texas are uninsured, the highest of any state) but in congressional districts within those states that are Democratic.

But that might not be the case. Gallup released poll numbers this morning that tell a rather different story: it suggests that not only are the uninsured not mostly Democrats, they are predominantly members of that coveted electoral demographic, independents. According to Gallup's numbers, only 31 percent are Democrats, compared with 48 percent independents. Based on that, Gallup draws a starkly different conclusion than Bacon:

Given this finding from Gallup Daily tracking in March, passing healthcare legislation did not merely cater to the Democrats' base, but could potentially expand it among the uninsured themselves, who may now have more reason to support Democrats. Gallup polling immediately after the healthcare vote found 58% of uninsured Americans, compared with 45% of insured Americans, favoring the bill.

Unfortunately, I can't track down the Post poll data—it does not appear to be in the results of the poll Katie wrote about—so it's impossible to draw a solid apples-to-apples comparison of the two polls. But Gallup's results suggest there might be more in this for Democrats than just rallying the base.