Democrats More Extreme about Healthcare than Republicans or Independents

Trump News, Trump Polls, and Trump Approval Rating

On the question, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling health care issues ?”, a bit more than 60% of Democrats “Strongly disapprove” and a bit more than 10% “Somewhat disapprove”. On the other hand, 40% of Republicans “Somewhat approve” and a bit more that 30% “Strongly approve”.

Three bar graphs showing the distributions of responses to three questions about Healthcare. Each of the three bar graphs shows democrats more heavily skewed toward extreme responses than independents or republicans.

What is interesting to me is that, in both cases, if we combine strongly and somewhat into a single bucket, then we have roughly the same total percentage in the expected buckets – a bit over 70% of Democrats disapprove and a bit over 70% of Republicans approve. The main difference is that a greater percentage of Democrats choose the extreme (“strongly”) option.

Here are two bar charts where we separate the direction of a response (approve/disapprove) from the magnitude of a response (strongly/somewhat) to the first question about Trump and healthcare.

By separating the direction from the magnitude of the response, we can sharpen our analysis.

The above two bar charts show us four things:

(1) Independents (Swing Voters) disapprove more than they approve of Trump on healthcare.

(2) Democrats favor the more extreme response of “strongly” than do republicans or independents.

(3) Republicans favor the more moderate response of “somewhat” than do independents or democrats.

(4) Independents favored “no opinion” more so than republicans or democrats.

Republic vs Democracy

This may have something to do with what the names “Democrat” and “Republican” mean: Democrats believe we are voting for powerful leaders of government empowered to solve all our problems (such as healthcare), while Republican believe we are voting for leaders with constitutionally limited powers. Thus while Democrats believe that the government is the solution to our healthcare problems, Republicans believe that government has only a limited role. So Republican responses are tempered by the idea that part of the government’s handing of healthcare should be to stay out of it.

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Source: The Economist/YouGov Polls

Trump vs Obama – Size Matters

There is much denial about the Trump economy. Perhaps this chart based on real data helps. People are buying that new queen size mattress or full size mattress and everything else with their Trump tax refunds.

As I write the Dow Jones today is 24,572.75 and the stock market hours are as usual. Of course, the evening news headline may read “Stock Market Crash Today”. Yet, chances are that as you read the visual evidence given by the graph above stands.

The above graph and the use of horizontal and vertical lines shows how the qualitative data approach gives us a data story better than a list of exact numbers ever could. Having emphasized the power of a graph to stand as an infographic, I will say no more.

Learn the skills you need to work with data like this at

StraightForwardInfo.com