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Is Health Care Good Politics?

Nate Silver summarizes the state of public opinion and health care:

More polling data is starting to pour in on health care reform and it generally contains decent, but not great, numbers for Democrats. Most of the polls show a bump of some kind in approval for health care reform -- but it's not as large as that implied by the USA Today/Gallup one-day poll that was released on Tuesday. If we take an average of the four polls that have been conducted entirely after the health care bill passed the House, rather (those from Gallup, Rasmussen, Quinnipiac and CBS), they average out to 43 percent in favor and 46 percent opposed. Those are numbers that I think Democrats would gladly take relative to where health care has been in the past, but it's not exactly as though the bill has become wildly popular -- nor is it likely to do so in advance of the midterms.

In other words, the public is nearly split. The Democrats are obviously far better off than they'd have been if they let health care reform die, but it's still not an overall asset right now.