Among self-identified independents, single payer support decreases with age. This trend does not really occur among Democrats or Republicans. Single payer support among Democrats is basically flat around 90 percent and single payer support among Republicans drops rapidly at 35 and then stays nearly constant around 20 percent. It’s possible this trend is a quirk of the sample size but independent voters may also be responding to the Republican lie that Democrats want to destroy the coverage provided by Medicare and Medicaid to pay for a single payer system. It should give progressives hope for the future that over 35 percent of young swing district Republicans support single payer health care.

The bottom of this post has similar heatmaps for the five other questions asked by the Upshot/Siena team. Since the questions were structured in different ways, blue visualizations means progressives support the policy in question and red visualizations mean conservative support the policy in question. With the tax cuts as an exception, every demographic slice of independents favor progressive policies to conservative ones. Even in the case of the tax cut support is weak, just over 50 percent of independents over fifty years old support them. Looking at the race crosstabs in swing districts, no overarching trend really emerges. Age, however, paints a different story. Younger independents and Republicans tend to be less conservative than the older peers. The most significant exception to this finding is on an assault weapons ban, which 28 percent of 18 to 34 year old Republicans support compared to 49 percent of Republicans older than 65. Guns aside, the Upshot/Siena polling paints an encouraging portrait for progressives.

The American system may be full of systemic disadvantages, but our ideas, especially single payer, really are popular.