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The Republican party has spent a great portion of the 2018 midterm cycle maligning Democrats for supporting Medicare for All, often erroneously saying that individual candidates support it when they don’t.
Despite that, the policy proposal has caught fire with a significant portion of elected Democrats. And a new Ipsos poll conducted for The Daily Beast found that a plurality of Republicans seem to support it too.
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The survey asked voters to rank a set of issues on a scale of 1 to 7 with regards to how much of a priority they should be for the next Congress. In all, 60 percent of respondents indicated that pursuing Medicare for All would be a high priority to them (designated by selecting five, six, or seven on the scale). That figure includes 78 percent of Democrats, a figure that is not surprising given the base’s position on health care. But 40 percent of Republicans surveyed also indicated that it was a high priority. That’s slightly more than the 38 percent that indicated that it was a low priority, as marked by those who gave it a one, two, or three rating on the provided scale.
Medicare of All as a legislative concept has languished in progressive circles for years and never been broached seriously as a policy pursuit by Congress. It likely will not be next session either, with Donald Trump still president and Republicans well situated to run the Senate. But the proposal has gained steam, led primarily by advocacy from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Sanders himself is widely popular in the Ipsos poll. Overall 55 percent of those surveyed had a favorable view of the Vermont senator with 82 percent of Democrats holding that view and 25 percent of Republicans as well. Sanders earned favorable ratings from 55 percent of Independents in the survey.
It’s not wholly out of the ordinary for self-identified Republicans to look at extended health care coverage in a favorable light. In fact, according to a September survey conducted for the pro-Trump group America First Policies, 24 percent of President Trump’s supporters said they’d be more likely to vote for a candidate who advocated for Medicare for All.
The Ipsos survey was conducted for The Daily Beast from October 30 to November 1 with a sample of 1,688 registered voters, including 642 Democrats, 643 Republicans and 292 Independents.
