For all the punditry about how the Supreme Court ruling on healthcare would play, 45 percent of Americans don’t know what happened.
Ari MelberAlmost half the country still has no idea what the Supreme Court did in last week’s healthcare ruling—one of the most important cases in the last decade, if not since the New Deal.
The nonpartisan Pew Research Center asked people point-blank what the Court did, and 30 percent of people said they didn’t know, while another 15 percent incorrectly said the law was overturned. That rounds out to about 45 percent at “no clue,” when you think about it:
This data is an antidote to all the political and media commentary, across the spectrum, about the inevitably huge impact the decision will have on public opinion and the November election.
There is a dose of partisanship in the findings. Democrats were more likely to correctly answer that the law was upheld—only 11 percent thought it was rejected—while more Republicans incorrectly held onto the belief that it was rejected (19 percent of Republicans thought the Court overturned the law).
Overall, however, the clear takeaway is that even after the relentless media coverage, political passions and controversial intrigue surrounding the case, much of the population is simply not absorbing facts on the outcome of the case.
Ari MelberTwitterAri Melber is The Nation's Net movement correspondent, covering politics, law, public policy and new media, and a regular contributor to the magazine's blog. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a J.D. from Cornell Law School, where he was an editor of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. Contact Ari: on Facebook, on Twitter, and at amelber@hotmail.com. Melber is also an attorney, a columnist for Politico and a contributing editor at techPresident, a nonpartisan website covering technology’s impact on democracy. During the 2008 general election, he traveled with the Obama Campaign on special assignment for The Washington Independent. He previously served as a Legislative Aide in the US Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign. As a commentator on public affairs, Melber frequently speaks on national television and radio, including including appearances on NBC, CNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Bloomberg News, FOX News, and NPR, on programs such as “The Today Show,” “American Morning,” “Washington Journal,” “Power Lunch,” "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell," "The Joy Behar Show," “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” and “The Daily Rundown,” among others. Melber has also been a featured speaker at Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Columbia, NYU, The Center for American Progress and many other institutions. He has contributed chapters or essays to the books “America Now,” (St. Martins, 2009), “At Issue: Affirmative Action,” (Cengage, 2009), and “MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country,” (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2004). His reporting has been cited by a wide range of news organizations, academic journals and nonfiction books, including the The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, CNN, FOX News, National Review Online, The New England Journal of Medicine and Boston University Law Review. He is a member of the American Constitution Society, he serves on the advisory board of the Roosevelt Institute and lives in Manhattan.