Fox News' Trace Gallagher cited a poll showing 54 percent of Americans don't like Obamacare as a reason to back the Republican plan to shut down the federal government if the law is not defunded. Gallagher's analysis is at odds with multiple polls cited earlier the same day by his Fox colleague Gregg Jarrett that showed a majority of Americans do not support Republican defunding efforts.
On September 20, House Republicans passed a continuing resolution that would defund the Affordable Care Act (ACA) but continue to fund the government. Senate Republicans have criticized the plan, with Richard Burr of North Carolina describing it as “the dumbest idea I've ever heard of.”
On the September 20 edition of Studio B with Shepard Smith, guest host Trace Gallagher said during an interview with The Hill's managing editor, Bob Cusack, "[T]hey're not just a bunch of nutty House members up there voting for this thing. I mean look, 54 percent, the latest polls show 54 percent of Americans are against Obamacare, so the House is at least fighting for the majority of Americans."
But Gallagher ignored polls showing that a majority of Americans oppose the Republican effort to defund Obamacare -- a fact made clear during an earlier Fox News segment. During that segment, Fox News host Gregg Jarrett advised Monica Crowley that he had “looked at three different polls today. They all say the same thing. That is, as unpopular -- and it is -- as Obamacare is, they don't want the government shut down because of a defunding effort.”
An August poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 57 percent of Americans disapprove of cutting off funding “as a way to stop the law from being implemented, a finding that has been consistent in Kaiser Health Tracking Polls since January 2011.”
Furthermore, the conservative Heritage Foundation found that 52 percent of Americans believe implementation of the law should move forward, as reported by Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald:
[E]ven this push poll that dramatically oversamples Republicans (more on that in a minute) finds respondents are more likely to say that the Affordable Care Act should be kept than scrapped -- and that a plurality would blame Republicans if the government were to shut down.
Only 44.5 percent “oppose the health care law and think it should be repealed,” while 52 percent either support the law as is or have some concerns, but say they think implementation should move forward. And asked whom they would blame if “there was an impasse between president Obama and Congress on whether to continue to fund the health care law, and that impasse resulted in a partial government shutdown,” the top response (28 percent) was Republicans in Congress. The next option, Obama, got 21 percent of respondents.
Gallagher's dishonest reading of the American public's attitude toward defunding the Affordable Care Act is the latest example of Fox's dishonest characterization of the House vote to defund the law, which FoxNews.com recently described as a vote “to keep government open.”