If you're wondering why Republican candidates have been rushing to trumpet their support for the pre-existing conditions coverage guaranteed by the Affordable Care Act, it's because voter support for that very popular provision is soaring after Republicans spent two years desperately trying to undercut it. In multiple polls, strong majorities of both Democrats and Republicans say insurers should have to cover all people despite whether they have previous health issues.
That support has Donald Trump suddenly promising that "all Republicans" support the pre-existing condition provision while Republicans actively working to gut the coverage—like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Missouri’s Attorney General turned Senate candidate, Josh Hawley—have cut ads over the past week in which they pledge their support for covering pre-existing conditions.
The question left by the GOP's revelatory embrace of important ACA provisions even as they continue efforts to invalidate the law, is whether their appeals are breaking through. In other words, do voters really believe Republicans can actively work to strike down the law and yet legitimately claim to support the law's most critical features?
Democrats, like Sen. Claire McCaskill who Hawley hopes to unseat, are arguing that you can't have it both ways. So who do voters believe? One clue to that question comes from Civiqs data showing that support for repealing the entire law has been steadily declining among GOP voters ever since late August, when Democratic candidates began making their closing arguments on increased healthcare coverage for all Americans. Among Republican voters, in particular, support for full repeal of the ACA had been humming along all summer at about 82/83 percent. But in the final days of August, support for repeal began declining steadily to about 78 percent today.
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That slide for repeal among Republicans has led to a two-point drop in total support for repeal in the same time period, with just 38 percent of voters still favoring all-out repeal for the law while 44 percent support expanding the law to do more.
While that doesn't necessarily tell us how GOP voters who support the ACA and pre-existing conditions coverage will vote in two weeks, it does indicate that the Democrats' intense focus on health care is hitting home, even among Republican voters. Clearly, GOP candidates are seeing the same trends in their internal polling or they wouldn't be racing to convince voters of their sincere support for a law they've been actively trying to undermine for nearly a decade now.