I'm all for a public option, Dan, but as quoted, that doesn't seem to be a very useful poll question. "Do you feel it is important to have a choice between a government-run health care insurance option and private coverage?" can mean different things to each camp. The clear implication is that a situation exists (or may exist) where there is no choice, i.e. either all MUST have private coverage or all MUST have gov't coverage. So, pro-public option people answer affirmatively because it preserves the option, but otherwise anti-public option people see it as positing a reality where public option might be the ONLY option, so they want to protect their ability to choose.

That's a lot of words to say: this is a shitty poll question that was probably designed to get this slanted result.

Most polls where a straight up "Do you support public option"-type question is posited yield somewhere in the neighborhood of 50/50 responses right now.

Also, conservatives aren't going to hear the word "option" in there, they are going to hear "government run health care."

I would go further on a limb and say that anyone who has ever done any phone-banking with surveys (like me, unfortunately) knows that this Q is waaaay above the level of most people who will actually talk to you.

I would have to agree that polling questions like that are essentially useless at this point. You could ask someone "do you like Medicare?" and "do you think the government is incapable of creating a health care program that you could like?" and there is a good chance that they would answer yes for both questions.

It's probably better to go back to the polls that were done in the spring or earlier, before the waters got so muddied.