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Poll: Warren’s Support Radically Plummeting, Sliced In Half

   DailyWire.com
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) speaks to guests during a campaign stop at the Val Air Ballroom on November 25, 2019 in West Des Moines, Iowa.
Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

If a new Quinnipiac poll is accurately reflecting the political fortunes of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), her 2020 presidential candidacy is in deep trouble. Last month’s Quinnipiac poll found Warren garnering 28% of voters; this month her support plummeted to 14%.

Allahpundit at HotAir has an idea why Warren is plunging in the polls, and it makes sense. He surmises that her sudden and dizzying drop in the polls since October coincides with the attacks launched at Warren for her health care plan, a version of Medicare for All, and her obfuscations when it came to offering details about it.

AllahPundit notes that when Quinnipiac asked people if they supported Medicare for All two years ago, voters favored it 51%-38%; earlier this year that slipped underwater to 43%-45%, and the latest poll found it had plunged to 36%-52%. He says of Warren: “She was savaged by both sides when she rolled out her health-care plan earlier this month: Righties thought the math was farcical, lefties thought she lacked the guts displayed by Bernie Sanders to tell the truth about the costs and new taxes involved.” Allahpundit notes that at the mid-October presidential debate Pete Buttigieg attacked Warren’s unwillingness to give specifics about how she’d fund her health care plan.

Quinnipiac substantiated Allahpundit’s supposition by writing of their results, “A plurality, 26 percent, say health care is the most important issue to their vote, while 21 percent say climate change, and 14 percent say the economy. Health care is an issue which helps Biden, as he gets the vote of 27 percent of those who list health care as their most important issue, followed by Sanders at 19 percent and Warren and Buttigieg at 14 percent each.”

As The Daily Wire’s Ashe Schow reported on November 18:

In September, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) led the Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa poll for the Democratic primary. Today she has fallen to a distant second place, in a statistical tie with former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) … The biggest change for Warren since the release of the September poll was the unveiling of her plan to fund her Medicare-for-All proposal. The latest Iowa poll found this was at least part of the reason for Warren’s slide …

Warren’s plan to fund her Medicare-for-All proposal relies on fantasy estimations and assumptions. Unlike Sanders, Warren claims she can raise $52 trillion over the next 10 years without raising taxes on the middle class. She says she can accomplish this by cutting military funding and taxing the wealthy. She also claims immigration reform would help raise the money, even though such reform has been impossible to get through Congress in the current and previous two administrations. Her plan also vastly overestimates the amount that would be collected from proper tax collection.

Speaking to The Daily Wire, Health care policy expert and American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Scholar Joe Antos said this about Medicare for All:

The promise of free health care means that patients will have no financial reason to question whether a service is necessary. The reality of reduced provider payment rates means that physicians will have a strong incentive to try to make up their income losses by providing more services, especially those services that Medicare overpays. We could see increases in the volume of services that are not very effective, not very harmful to the patient, and more highly remunerative than more necessary care.

The broader effects on the economy could be very damaging. Warren has admitted that thousands of people now employed in the health industry would lose their jobs, but she claims that they will just shift to good jobs in other industries. That’s not so simple if you don’t have the skills needed for that next good job. If it exists. That’s the rub. Warren’s proposals to tax companies, individuals with high incomes, and wealth would create a serious drag on the economy. What she overlooks is that those taxes will take vast sums out of more productive sectors and pump it into the notoriously inefficient health sector. By and large, the wealth of this country goes into productive investments that create jobs, largely outside the health sector.

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