Fewer than one in four Americans support sabotage of Obamacare

By Greg Sargent, WashPost, Updated: September 16, 2013

It continues to go overlooked in the Beltway argument over Obamacare, but one of the most fundamental factors shaping the politics of all of this is that disapproval of the Affordable Care Act does not necessarily translate into support for Republican efforts to undermine or sabotage the law.

Republicans and conservatives constantly justify either their repeated votes to repeal the law, or their threats of destructive confrontations to defund or delay it, by citing public dissatisfaction with it as proof the public supports their efforts. Yet there’s little to no polling evidence to suggest one translates into support for the other. Indeed, there’s evidence the opposite is true.

Today’s new Pew Research poll again drives this home with striking clarity. It finds 53 percent of Americans disapprove of the Affordable Care Act, versus only 42 percent who approve. This mirrors a new NBC/WSJ poll finding pluralities think the law is a bad idea and will be more damaging than not. No question: Obamacare polls terribly.

But the Pew poll finds something else that’s just as important: There’s virtually no public support for efforts to undermine the law:

The 53% of the public who disapprove of the law are divided over what they would like elected officials who oppose the law to do now that the law has begun to take effect. About half of disapprovers (27% of the public overall) say these lawmakers “should do what they can to make the law work as well as possible,” but nearly as many (23% of the public) say these officials “should do what they can to make the law fail.”

(More here.)