The consensus among wonks is that Democratic politicians who support Medicare for All are saddling themselves with an unpopular policy. Never mind whether they’re supporting an effective policy; it’s considered gauche for savvy pundit types to evince concern over the hoi polloi. No, the tried and true know that the electoral fortunes of political elites is America’s paramount concern. And so, with a certain amount of breathlessness, the end of Kamala Harris’s candidacy and the recent drop in Elizabeth Warren’s poll numbers have been held up as new evidence of this most important dynamic.

A Daily Beast article in November quoted the always looming and ever-fretful senior Democrats describing Medicare for All as “fucking poison,” adding: “You touch it, you turn to dust.” (As of publication, Bernie Sanders remains in solid corporeal form and in second place in polls nationally.) A Politico article this week referred to the “casualty list” of presidential candidates harmed by having tangled with single-payer. On the left, different explanations have arisen: Harris and Warren were not harmed by endorsing single-payer but by walking back their initial endorsements. A Jacobin article suggested that Harris was actually more harmed by her “flip-flopping” than by supporting single-payer in the first place, as was Warren, and argued that voters “can tell the difference between candidates who are ironclad supporters of a policy because they believe it’s the right thing to do, and candidates who are calibrating their message to avoid criticism and please as many people as possible.”



The average Democratic primary voter is not paying attention to the online left squabbles about Warren’s and Sanders’s stances on health care; they are not reading Jacobin. They do not necessarily agree with me that Warren’s latter-day proposal to pass a public option before returning to single-payer in her third year represents an obvious, cynical attempt to get out of the Medicare for All fight. They might not even know she has changed her plan at all. Indeed, there’s no real evidence that her declining numbers have much to do with her support for or prevarication on Medicare for All, though it’s perfectly plausible that voters would perceive a certain lack of trustworthiness because of her dodge on how to pay for it. Harris dodged even harder and wavered even more, producing a ridiculous compromise policy; perhaps this is the price Warren pays, perhaps not. It is, however, rather difficult to attribute Warren’s polling dip to her embrace of Medicare for All when her highest poll numbers came at a time when she claimed to be fully “with Bernie” on the issue, and when a significant majority of Democrats still approved of the policy.



The broader public is not militantly devoted to Medicare for All. It’s unreasonable to expect that most voters are as engaged with the early primary process as its participants are; hence, it’s likely that most don’t fully know what the policy is. We truly cannot yet know how effective a Republican anti–Medicare for All ad campaign would be in swinging independent voters, though we do know that Bernie Sanders, the face of Medicare for All, beats Trump in most polls and that his campaign understands the potency of turning out disaffected voters more than others.



But while the public isn’t necessarily desperate for Medicare for All, the polls are not as definitive as the headlines would have you believe. In fact, the polls that are most often cited as evidence of public wariness for Medicare for All frequently show the opposite dynamic. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll in November showed 53 percent support Medicare for All, which is lower than it was in March but is still a majority. Of Democratic-leaning independents, 39 percent trust Bernie Sanders on health care, which is 21 points higher than the next candidate, Joe Biden. If Medicare for All were anathema, it is unlikely that the candidate most known for it would outpace the field on this question.

