Two-Thirds Back Medicare for All. Many Don't Know What It Is.
NPR reports that midterm candidates are talking up Medicare for All, and that a poll found two out of three Americans said they support it. NPR also notes the phrase speaks to a desire for radical change, though many don't really know what it is.
That pairing is the whole career of a slogan: broad agreement, thin definition. Two out of three is a formidable number, but a label that everyone can endorse precisely because nobody has to agree on its contents is a strange kind of mandate. When a phrase does the work of a plan, the argument tends to arrive later, at the drafting stage, and it usually arrives with fewer friends than the slogan had.
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Support for a phrase can be genuine even when the details are hazy. Two out of three people agreeing is a report about the health system, not a quiz result.
Or it's a report about the phrase. The more a label can mean anything, the better it polls — which is a caution about reading a support number as a mandate for a particular plan.