bernie tried to force a vote on 2k checks. why can't they do the same thing for medicare for all?

ultimately this once again boils down to the illusion that we all have a common set of problems and we just disagree with how to solve them

people going into 6 figure debt because of a medical procedure or diabetics dying because they can’t afford insulin is not a problem to rich people. they don’t actually want to solve it. that is why we don’t have universal healthcare. politicians represent rich people and only care about solving rich people problems of which healthcare is not one.

any meager wins that the proles may get are incidental or just small concessions that the ruling class feels like it had to make to prevent outright revolt

the class feels

It wouldn't be overwhelming though.

If the vote was forced, it would fail 305-130 or something like that.

i meant public support, not support from corrupt politicians in the corrupt democratic party the exists to keep us from getting medicare for all


like public support would be so overwhelming that they'd be pressured into giving us m4all against their will

M4A isn't really that popular. Or at least not important enough for people to care.

The only real M4A candidate lost in the Democratic primary. And not even to the "Medicare for all who want it" guy. To Joe Biden, who said he would veto M4A.

doesn't poll after poll show the most americans want m4a? and im guessing even more so now, during the pandemic, and with so much unemployment, and so many getting health insurance through their work

in this thread support for m4a is 100%

with people i know irl it's 100% or close to 100%. im guessing everyone in this thread and all they people they know irl it's close to 100%

even at the casino the trump supporting racist poker player land barons, they want m4a too

I'm not for m4a

it’s well supported

most polls i’ve seen put it in the high 60s

Yeah, I've seen all those polls too.

But, the fact is that they don't line up with people's voting patterns at all.

So either:
- The polls are off.
- The support is extremely weak. (i.e. while people say they support it, they don't actually care that much and/or would be just as, if not more, happy with a different plan)

Or is there some third option I'm not seeing?

I am personally in favor of M4A.

Based on my own conversations with people in my social circles, I can attest that the policy is not widely supported. Most of my younger, blue friends favor it, but there is an inverse correlation between age and support ime, regardless of color affiliation.

More broadly, the blue team barely eked a majority on the national stage and within Georgia, and support for M4A by the red team is abysmal.

I don't think it's accurate to suggest that M4A is what everybody wants - or at least, what everybody understands themselves to want.

Maybe not a separate option but more an add-on to #2 is that perhaps single-issue voters are more likely to have abortion/2A/taxation as their single issue than they are M4A.

There might be tons of republicans who support the idea of M4A, but not if it means voting for a pro-choice candidate.

Right. And most people aren't single issue voters. People vote on a collection of all kinds of things.

So this idea that forcing a vote on M4A in the House that will fail by 100 votes minimum would lead to a groundswell of populist anger that would lead to "giving us m4all against their will" sounds like complete fantasyland.

I wish it were true. But it's very clearly not.

There is a persistent disconnect between support for progressive policy and voting patterns and it is quite easily explained by the Democratic party. You can either view it as incompetence or as the fact that they don't actually want most of the policies enacted (I view it as the latter, and with Medicare for All this is quite clear since most of them don't even support it).

Medicare for All is a policy that helps people and the only reason there is not more enthusiasm for it is because media coverage and discussion of it in politics tends to be negative across the board.

And no one in the media or political circles ever talks about the possible benefits of left ideas to the democratic party. Somehow after black voters won dems GA, no one is flipping the discussion and talking about the possibility that defund the police messaging just won the party the senate and two dems that were painted incessantly as socialists performed the best of any dems in GA since Clinton.

You are totally missing the strategy.

This would allow AOC to get more candidates that support M4A to unseat incumbent dems which is already the strategy she has employed with small but consistent success. A lot of Dems that oppose M4A would be in serious trouble in primaries if they were on the record voting against it. The idea isn't to force Pelosi to be a decent human being, it is to replace her.

Poll questions are often worded and/or contextualized in a way that highly influences the immediate answer.

I had a poll call recently where the pollster cited crime statistics and community involvement by police, then asked something like "do you want deprive law enforcement with the funding it needs to keep the community safe"?

I explained to the guy on the phone that "keeping the community safe" requires reallocating LE money to social support services, but of course that was not a response option.

Most people asked that question would probably just say "no" because obviously nobody wants their community to be unsafe.



Even assuming the questions are fair, the results can be presented in a way that would not be consistent with the desires of those polled.

For example, according to a Marist poll cited by 538, "Medicare for All, replacing private insurance" polled at 41% overall, whereas "Medicare for All who choose it, allowing private insurance" polled at 70% overall.

One could report from this poll that M4A has 70% support with misleading accuracy.

Most really won't. You don't need an "on the record" vote.

The come right out and say they are against it.

Look at Henry Cuellar vs Jessica Cisernos.

Hell, look at Joe Biden. He literally said he would veto M4A. And he won the primary pretty easily.

Yes, this is the strategy.

But it takes time. We all hate it, but it's true.

Mark seems like a pretty smart guy, and I don't think "the media" is leading him around by the nose.

I think a lot of the problem we have in our political society is an outright dismissal of the other side's viewpoint as simply bamboozled by an insidious ptb, rather than an inferential disagreement or a dispute about end-goals.

Didn't Cuellar beat a 26 year old by 4 points? I think referring to him as now constantly in serious trouble is entirely fair.

Won easily feels a bit misleading for Biden, since it took Obama and other candidates intervention to make it an easy victory after a terrible start. When the discussion was on progressive issues in the early states, he was losing. He may have won regardless because of Bernie's inability to expand his base, but it was only easy because of the way others acted.

Yes, and I probably should’ve said something like “priority voters,” since I think that covers it better and is what you’re saying re: collection of issues. If a voter likes the idea of M4A, but it falls below their top couple/few priorities, they will never never vote for a candidate just based on their stance in M4A, no matter how compelling they think it is.

I don't know anything about Mark but one well-informed person not supporting it is totally irrelevant to my claim.

Yes, but that's kinda my point. This **** takes time and isn't going to be solved with a single doomed to fail vote that AOC uses all her political capital to force.

Exactly. Meaning the base of people who want M4A and will vote that way as a single issue is not that strong. If M4A is 60+% in the general population and 80+% in the Democratic party, there's very little need for expansion.

Biden had way more votes than all other nominees combined.

He played the long game, enabled by the extent of his political capital/investment, and it paid off.

I have been a Bernie-stan since 2016, and I can tell you that blue voters near me (Atlanta area) generally feared he was "too liberal" to win. The term "socialist" has incredible power with everyone over 40, and even a lot of younger people I talked to were reluctant to throw in for him (opting for Warren or Buttigieg as more temperate alternatives).


I really don't think the "my way or the highway" is a practical approach, and I'm glad that AOC (whose messaging I really, really like) sees that.

If your claim is the argument that people only don't want m4a because of media coverage, and mark doesn't want m4a outside of media coverage issues, I think my point is pretty relevant - unless Mark doesn't count as "people".

If you claim requires a generality ("people generally don't want..."), then I guess there's not much to discuss because at that level of abstraction what basis could there be for dissention? Maybe a query into the basis of the generalization?