With the 2008 presidential race well underway, some analysts believe that political independents will play a key role in the final vote. Last month, The Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University released a Survey of Political Independents exploring the views and priorities of these voters on a variety of issues. Today, a new Survey Brief is available, which takes an in-depth look at independents' views on health care, including the saliency of the issue, which party best represents their own views on health, whether candidates should focus more on lowering costs or expanding coverage, and willingness to pay to cover the uninsured.

Looking at self-identified independents as a whole, health care is a moderately salient issue, ranking third among most important problems for the government to address (well behind Iraq and just behind immigration, an issue that was receiving intense news coverage at the time of the poll), and second among issues that are extremely important to independents personally (behind Iraq). Yet because independents are not a uniform group, the brief also looks at how five different subgroups of independents think about health care.

Two groups in particular--"Disguised Democrats" and the "Disillusioned"--stand out as more likely to be moved by health care issues. These groups represent a third of all independents and 10% of the public overall, making them a key audience for candidates looking to break through with voters on this issue.

The Survey Brief is available online here.

The Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard University Survey Project is a three-way partnership and an experiment in combining survey research and reporting to better inform the public. The Survey of Political Independents, the 16th in this partnership series, was conducted by telephone from May 3 to June 3, 2007 among 2,140 randomly selected adults nationwide, including 1,014 self-identified independents. The margin of sampling error for results based on independents is plus or minus 4 percentage points; for subgroups the sampling error is higher. The three partners worked together to pick the survey topics, design the survey instruments, and analyze the results.

If you know anyone who would be interested in this alert, please pass it on.