For the better part of a decade, Republicans have foamed at the mouth at the mere mention of "Obamacare." They've spent thousands of hours on speeches and millions of dollars on attack ads outlining all the ways Obamacare was a disaster, and that message connected with a large portion of the American public. It's not hard to see why. Obamacare is a flawed system. The transition to ACA was rocky at best, premiums can be high, and the process of buying into the system can be difficult and frustrating, especially if you live in a state where the options are limited. So, yeah, when Republicans went out and railed against the plan for years, they found support.

But here's the thing. They didn't understand that support, and in the process they saved the very plan they wanted to repeal.

Republicans don't like Obamacare because a black Democrat named Barack Obama was behind it they don't like government meddling into industries. Now, forget for a second that the ACA was basically the Republican plan for health care years ago and was heavily based on former Republican candidate Mitt Romney's health-care plan in Massachusetts. The hypocrisy here isn't the point. The point is that there is a major part of the Republican Party that doesn't believe it's the government's job to have ANY hand in the health-insurance process. Their stupid and hubristic mistake was to believe that this meant EVERYONE who didn't like Obamacare didn't like it for this reason. So when Donald Trump got into power this past January and the Republicans finally had control of both houses of Congress and the White House, they went full steam ahead toward "repealing and replacing" Obamacare.

The problem, of course, was that even though most Americans didn't like Obamacare in polls, the number who didn't like it for the same bizarre ideological reason Republican lawmakers didn't like it was very few. In fact, most people who said they didn't like Obamacare actually didn't like it because they found it wasn't helpful enough! They wanted more coverage, not less. And few things reveal this more than the fact that, since Republicans have tried to eliminate the program, its polling numbers have risen to pretty overwhelming heights.

In fact, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows just how popular Obama's signature piece of legislation has gotten.

Washington Post

In fact, as Vox points out:

Obamacare is now more popular than the Democratic Party, Republican Party, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and President Trump himself.

You see, by overplaying their hands and trying to get rid of Obamacare outright, the Republicans have made the public go from thinking about Obamacare in terms of what it doesn't do to now thinking about it in terms of what it does do. And it does a lot of great things. It protects people with pre-existing conditions. It requires insurance companies to cover vital needs like emergency-room visits and maternity care. By threatening to take those things away from people, the GOP has made sure that Barack Obama's signature piece of legislation is more popular than ever.

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