TrumpCare is Incredibly Unpopular

No major proposal in the last 30 years comes close:

One move conservative pundits like is to make facile comparisons between the unpopularity of the ACA and the unpopularity of TrumpCare, but this is really misleading. The ACA was unpopular, but not nearly this unpopular. And second, Democrats could point out that while “Obamacare” didn’t poll very well, most of its underlying components are popular. And they were right — the ACA has become popular, and would be even more popular had the Supreme Court not ineptly re-written the Medicaid expansion. (I think this also goes to Erik’s implicit point below that messaging is overrated, but I’ll return to that in a separate post.) Nothing about BCRA — the savage Medicaid cuts, the deregulation, the subsidy cuts, the upper-class tax cuts — is popular.

Some Republican legislators are arguing that the BCRA is flailing because they didn’t expect Trump to win. But while I think this is true in some cases — such as the tax cut bill — I don’t think this is the issue with health care. After all, Republican health care plans have consistently been vaporware for decades, and Republicans have been cynically attacking the ACA from the implicit left long before Trump became the frontrunner. The reason for this is simple: people hate conservative health care ideas, and the more conservative an idea is the more people will hate it. The Republicans can pass BCRA and hope the various undemocratic aspects of American political institutions will shelter them, but they’ll never make it remotely popular. And, conversely, the popularity of the Medicaid expansion and the unpopularity of attacks on the ACA will further solidify a Democratic consensus in which the question is not whether to get to universal coverage system that is mostly or entirely public, but how.