Rasmussen: 61% say it’s time to drop ObamaCare

Sixty percent has always been the magic number Ace and I thought would lead to the final curtain. And now, at long last, here it is. Reminds me of the end of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” when Indy’s about to plummet into oblivion because he just can’t stop reaching for the grail even though his life depends on it. Voters to Obama: “Indiana, let it go.”

Sixty-one percent (61%) of U.S. voters say Congress should drop health care reform and focus on more immediate ways to improve the economy and create jobs.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 30% of voters nationwide disagree and think Congress should press ahead with health care…

Seventy percent (70%) of voters nationwide say the health care issue was important in the special Senate election in Massachusetts. That number includes 49% who say it was very important. Only 15% think the health care issue was not very or not at all important in the Tuesday election.

That 70 percent may be the most important result in the poll. If that many voters nationwide perceive the Massachusetts election as a referendum on ObamaCare, whether it really was or not, it makes using reconciliation to nuke Brown’s veto that much more dangerous.

Speaking of which, WaPo crunched the numbers on the Massachusetts race to find out what it was really all about. A referendum on O-Care? Not quite; in fact, The One should have been so lucky. The discontent was actually much broader than that:

When Obama was elected, 63 percent of Massachusetts voters said government should do more to solve problems, according to exit polling then. In the new poll, that number slipped to 50 percent, with about as many, 47 percent, saying that government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals…

Overall, just 43 percent of Massachusetts voters say they support the health-care proposals advanced by Obama and congressional Democrats; 48 percent oppose them. Among Brown’s supporters, however, eight in 10 said they were opposed to the measures, 66 percent of them strongly so…

Among Brown voters who say the health-care reform effort in Washington played an important role in their vote, the most frequently cited reasons were concerns about the process, including closed-door dealing and a lack of bipartisanship. Three in 10 highlighted these political machinations as the motivating factor, 22 percent expressed general opposition to reform or the current bill…

In Massachusetts, independents made up about half of Tuesday’s total electorate, according to the new poll, and they supported Brown by nearly a 2 to 1 margin. Obama carried Bay State independents by 17 percentage points in 2008. Among Brown voters, 29 percent said they backed Obama over Republican Sen. John McCain.

The two takeaways? An awful lot of Scott Brown supporters, many of whom were independents, had a fire lit under them by their contempt for ObamaCare. And a near majority — in Massachusetts — now think the government’s doing too much. The Dems’ exit strategy here (to borrow a phrase) is to focus laser-like on jobs for the rest of the year, but that’s an even tougher haul than health care was: Unemployment is here to stay and there’s only so much they can do about it. They could, of course, have done something about O-Care by either killing it months ago when the polls turned or taking a more modest course, but Obama and Pelosi et al. wanted to chase the dream, so here we are. Exit question via Michael Barone: Only 103 Democratic House seats are truly, fully safe now? Really?

Update: This seems like the right place for a Krauthammerian gloss.

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