The latest
monthly tracking poll from Kaiser Family Foundation shows support for Obamacare ticking up slightly, now at 44 percent, up from 39 percent in early June, and up from a big deficit of 33 percent in November, 2013. The approval rate has been slowly, incrementally rising—with a few dips—since then as the law is fully implemented and the public sees that it really isn't ruining anyone's lives.
But the opposition at roughly 40 percent has stayed pretty steady and is locked in. And that opposition wants nothing but repeal.
Opinion about what Congress should do next when it comes to the law also has been fairly constant over time. Nearly 3 in 10 (28 percent) say they want Congress to expand what the law does, an identical share (28 percent) hope for a complete repeal of the law, and the remainder fall in the middle by saying they want Congress to continue implementing the law as it is (22 percent) or scale it back (12 percent).
Those who want Congress to repeal the law in its entirety are split about what should happen next. Twelve percent say they think Congress should replace the law with a Republican-sponsored alternative, while 11 percent say they would like the law repealed and not replaced.
Although those who want the law repealed disagree about what Congress should do, they are unified in their unwavering desire for repeal. After being told that about 19 million people would become uninsured if the health care law were to be repealed, only 3 percent are swayed to say they no longer favor repealing the law. [emphasis added]
A huge majority of the public—70 percent—say that Republicans in Congress don't have any kind of agreed-upon alternative, even 58 percent of those who want the law repealed and replaced. That latter group clearly cares a lot more about the repeal than any other thing. This is one of the reasons Republicans have essentially just given lip service to coming up with a replacement plan—they're most loyal base doesn't care if they have one or not, doesn't care if millions of people lose their insurance. That minority of roughly 30 percent has been the same 30 percent of Republicans who remain on the extreme end of pretty much every issue and control the party.
That's why the plans that Republican hopefuls are coming up with don't have to be serious and don't have to be real. Which they aren't. They just have to have the magic word "repeal," and then any other thing that sounds vaguely policy-ish. But what this also means is that we're looking at a repeat of 2012: repeal can get you the GOP nomination, but it's not going to win the general.