Supreme Court ruling on healthcare changes… nothing?

The decision of the US Supreme Court to uphold Obama’s healthcare reforms made headlines and frontpages around the world, but early polling suggests it’ll have little or no difference on the outcome of the presidential election.

It seems that even if just over half of Americans want to see some or all of the law repealed, most of the slim majority are more likely to volunteer to perform open heart surgery on their own grandmother than vote for Barack anyway.

This would seem to be the natural implication of new poll data from the more-reliable-than-most Public Policy Polling, whose first sounding since the Court’s decision (showing a 48/45 split in Obama’s favour) is… you guessed it: exactly the same as the one before.

I suppose a residual yet potentially important question is what effect the ruling will have on voter turnout in November, and in a tight race turnout is key.

But when you dig behind the numbers it’s hard to believe, say, analysis in Politico of a different poll, suggesting that ‘Republicans are more likely to be fired up by the ruling than Democrats — and could vote in stronger numbers in November.’

Hard to believe because:

Although much of Washington fixated on the Supreme Court last week, the Kaiser poll found that only three in five respondents were aware the court had ruled.