It's year eight of Republicans' single-minded obsession with repealing Obamacare—not elected Republicans, that is, but the Republican base. The only demographic in the nation now that still opposes the law is people who are still willing to tell pollsters they are Republicans, and according to the latest Kaiser Family Foundation survey, it's 78 percent of them.
The GOP can't convince anyone else to vote for them, so they figure what they have to do is whip up those dead-enders one more time. That's why you've got Vice President Mike Pence and House Majority Whip Steve Scalise insisting that Obamacare repeal will definitely happen if they get the House and Senate, again. Never mind that we've been hearing that since 2014 when they did get the whole of Congress, and we still have Obamacare.
Doug Holtz-Eakin, a former campaign aide to John McCain, tells Axios "It's all about the base, because as far as I can tell, they've lost the independents, there's no one left to woo." Robert Blendon of Harvard's School of Public Health adds, "The Republicans face a very odd problem … when you ask actually registered voters what they want to do with the future of the ACA, no one wants to repeal and replace it except the Republicans, which the majority do." The big majority of Republicans, that is. Which happens to be a shrinking demographic.
"If you are looking at the aggregate," Blendon says of the strong public support the ACA is not getting, "you can't imagine why you'd even mention it. But if you’re trying to encourage your own voters … then they're trying to say that we would come back and try to do something." They've got to find something to make the base turn out, or it will be a total bloodbath for them.
That something isn't going to be their tax cuts. Even a Fox News Poll found that the tax cuts are far less popular than Obamacare. There aren't enough Republicans to make those tax cuts for the rich popular—just 40 percent of voters support them.
So here we go again.
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