One Little Survey Question Explains All of Politics

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You come to Mother Jones for unique journalism, and we love doing it for you. That's it. That's the upshot of our fall fundraising drive, and we're hoping to raise $250,000 in a shorter than normal three-week window so we can keep right on doing it.

Jonathan Bernstein points to a new Kaiser survey that examines opposition to the individual mandate in Obamacare. Here’s what they found:

It remains among the least popular aspects of the law — with just a 35 percent approval rating. But when people are told that the mandate doesn’t affect most Americans because they already have coverage through an employer, support jumps to 62 percent.

It only takes a modest bit of reading between the lines to figure out what’s really going on here: when people find out that the mandate doesn’t apply to them personally, lots of them are suddenly OK with it. In case politics has always mystified you, that’s it in a nutshell. Now you know.