The Morning Plum: The GOP’s fundamental miscalculation on Obamacare
What if Republicans — in their drive to repeal and even defund Obamacare — are making the same mistake they made in 2012 about the economy?
Last year, Republicans gambled that high public dissatisfaction with Obama’s economic performance meant majorities had concluded that the President had been an abject failure, meaning there was simply no chance he’d be reelected. Instead, exit polls suggested voters didn’t hold Obama to blame for the economy in high enough numbers to ensure his defeat. One possible explanation — advanced by Ron Brownstein, yours truly and others — is that despite their disappointment, they found the sluggishness of the recovery understandable, given the circumstances, and saw the election as a nuanced choice between sticking with a disappointing status quo and a worse alternative. Republicans appeared caught off guard by this.
A similar miscalculation may be guiding the current GOP drive to repeal Obamacare — and the conservative drive to shut down the government to force its defunding.
For a long time now, the polling on Obamacare has shown a pattern. Disapproval of the law runs high, and polls that offer respondents a straight choice between repeal and keeping the law as is find high support for repeal. But polls that offer a more nuanced range of options — such as changing the law or repealing parts of it — find only minority support for the GOP position of full repeal. This pattern has been clear for years now. Meanwhile, polls that ask directly whether Republicans should keep blocking the law find majority opposition to that.
It seems reasonable to surmise that dissatisfaction with the law may not necessarily translate into broad support for getting rid of it entirely (let alone replacing it with nothing). As in 2012, voters may be taking a longer, more nuanced view than Republicans think.
More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/08/07/the-morning-plum-the-gops-fundamental-miscalculation-about-obamacare/
