Pennsylvania Voters Want a Better Health Care Law

Exit polls are a wealth of information on the thinking of the voters in an election.  For this year's election all of the networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, and AP) used the same exit poll to save money with a national sample of 26,517.  The methodology for the exit poll can be read here.  There were some questions left blank on the survey, particularly the later issue questions such as the ones for the one for the health care law "What should happen to the health care law?".  Nationally only 5,043 completed that question which was late on the questionnaire.  Above I linked to the ABC news page for the exit poll which shows the sample size for each question and how they voted for each candidate.

For Pennsylvania there was a total sample of 2,908 in the exit poll.  Of the this sample, 1,019 responded to the health care law which is 20.2% of the total responses to this question.  The table below shows that a different pattern emerges for the question in the national responses compared to Pennsylvania. 

	National 2012 N=5,043	Pennsylvania 2012 N=1,019	Pennsylvania 2010 N=2,627 (tot. sample)
Expand  or keep it the same	44%	51%	52%
Repeal some or all of it	48%	46%	45%
Margin of Error (+/-)	1%	3%	2%

According to the national exit poll it would seem that a plurality of voters would like some or all of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) repealed but only 19% of the total sample responded to the question.  This only a problem if the responders are similar to the population as a whole.  That this result is not consistent with other national polls which were done around the time of the Supreme Court interpretation found a similar split to the Pennsylvania result. 

For the Pennsylvania exit poll, a slight majority of respondents believed the ACA should be expanded or kept the same.  This result is the same as the 2010 exit poll from the Senate race between Pat Toomey and Joe Sestak.  That year was considered a landslide for Republicans.  35% of the total state sample responded to this question as well as other question suggests either that this and other issues resonate more with this state's voters or that there is a sampling issue in other states.  Regardless these results suggest that there is still fertile ground for health care activists in Pennsylvania among the electorate.

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