Interesting story on Vox this morning about voters in the Kentucky 5th CD which asserts that partisanship may be stronger than Trump’s (AHCA) failings.
Original story here.
This is a follow up to this story: Why Obamacare enrollees voted for Trump
Some pull quotes . . .
In southeastern Kentucky, the Obamacare enrollees I interviewed were disappointed — but they also weren’t mad that their Congress member, Hal Rogers, voted to pass it. They talked about all the other good things he had done for the area in his decades of service. They gave him the benefit of the doubt, expecting that he must have cast his vote to improve the economy or solve a budget issue.
. . .
But Oller doesn’t regret her vote for Trump — “I don’t have regrets,” she says plainly — and she trusts that Rogers, whom she has also voted for, knows what he’s doing. She gets most her news from his weekly emails to constituents; she cites his arguments for why the law needs to be repealed.
This sentiment felt ubiquitous in Corbin. Obamacare enrollees I interviewed didn’t like the Republican plan, but they still trusted the Republican Party to do the right thing on health care.
62-year-old Clifford Hoskins did state that the ACHA would influence his vote.
There were certainly parts of the Trump agenda he liked, such as the president’s immigration policy. “I've not got anything again the wall,” Hoskins says. “I've got nothing against protecting our borders.”
But he says he’d be a one-issue voter when the next election rolls around if Republicans repeal the Affordable Care Act. “If they do away with this, there are going to be a lot of changes to my voting,” he says. “This is my biggest issue right now.”
To Hoskins, this was common sense: Of course votes would shift if Congress voted to end health insurance for millions of Americans. He predicted that Rogers’s vote to repeal Obamacare “probably changed every working person’s opinion [who is] on the Affordable Care Act.”
However, he seems to be in the minority:
Most Obamacare enrollees I talked to didn’t like the Republican bill, but they didn’t think it would change their votes either. [Emphasis mine]
Michael Martin, a 47-year-old Obamacare enrollee . . . wouldn’t tell me whom he voted for in the 2016 election; the people I met generally seemed more reticent to talk about which candidate they favored during this trip. But he did say he’d supported Rogers in the past and was currently puzzling over his Congress member’s vote. He wasn’t necessarily mad, more confused. I asked him whether he thought Rogers had the best interests of Kentuckians at heart.
“He’s gotta know, right?” Martin responded. “Well, he’s gotta know, but I can’t see the reasoning why he voted ‘yes,’ you know?”
. . .
Bobbi Smith . . . felt like she had picked a side in America’s political debate, and for now, she is going to stick with it.
“We choose which party we place our values with,” she says. “We’re supposed to trust them to do for us, you know, what our party stands for.”
The takeaway for me is that if we want to make electoral gains, we need to show what the GOP really stands for: corporations and the rich.
