Less than a third of the public wants to see Republicans keep trying to pass a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll.
By a 14-percentage-point margin, 45 percent to 31 percent, Americans say the GOP should move onto other issues rather than keep working to get their own health care bill passed. Another 24 percent aren’t sure.
About a third of those surveyed want to see Obamacare repealed. The majority, 53 percent, believe Congress should keep the current law in place ― but among those, 46 percent say lawmakers should continue to work to improve it rather than simply leave it as is.
Still, 52 percent see repeal as at least somewhat likely, with just 26 percent saying it’s not very or not at all likely.
If the public appetite for a repeal is limited, the appetite for the alternatives being proposed is even more constricted. Both versions of the GOP effort to repeal Obamacare are deeply unpopular, the survey finds.
Just 21 percent of Americans favor the American Health Care Act ― a 10-point drop since the bill passed the House of Representatives in May. Only 5 percent are strongly in favor. Forty-five percent oppose the bill.
The Senate’s Better Care Reconciliation Act, for which the chamber’s GOP leaders are struggling to find enough votes to pass, fares similarly poorly. Only 19 percent of Americans favor that bill, with 4 percent backing it strongly; 43 percent oppose it.
Just over a third of those polled say they understand the difference between the two bills somewhat well, and only 7 percent that they understand it very well.
The HuffPost/YouGov survey is just the latest in a spate of bad polling for the Republican repeal efforts. Surveys released this week have found support for the GOP bills topping out at 38 percent and veering as low as 12 percent, with opposition hovering between 43 and 58 percent.
Underlying the bills’ poor numbers is a wave of vehement opposition from the left that isn’t counterbalanced by similar support from President Donald Trump’s base.
In the HuffPost/YouGov survey, for instance, 80 percent or more of voters who supported Hillary Clinton in last year’s election say they oppose both the House and Senate health care bills, while fewer than half of Trump voters support either.
Use the widget below to further explore the results of the HuffPost/YouGov survey, using the menu at the top to select survey questions and the buttons at the bottom to filter the data by subgroups:
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted June 27-28 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
HuffPost has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn moreabout this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the polls’ methodology are available here.
Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.