Conservatives have spent a good chunk of this year trying to convince the public that Obamacare is the spawn of Satan and needs to be repealed in its entirety. For all their efforts, though, they seem to be convincing no one. Indeed, if anything, support for repeal is dropping.
This is the finding in the new Kaiser Health Tracking poll, conducted just after the election. In that poll, 49 percent of respondents wanted to either expand the Affordable Care Act (27 percent) or keep it as is (22 percent). Just 33 percent wanted to either repeal it and replace with a Republican alternative (14 percent) or repeal it without a replacement (19 percent). In July of this year, however, the split was almost even (45 percent to 46 percent) between these two broad alternatives.
And some important groups are even more opposed than the public at large to repealing Obamacare. An election eve poll of Latino voters by Latino Decisions for ImpreMedia showed this quite clearly. The poll asked Latino voters whether Obamacare should be left to stand as law or be repealed. By an overwhelming 61 percent to 25 percent margin, they said Obamacare should continue as law.
Conservatives are not getting many buyers for their plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Maybe they should just accept that Obamacare is here to stay and that the public is OK with that.
Ruy Teixeira is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.