It’s also somewhat surprising, given the Trump administration’s many efforts to undermine and besmirch the law that’s named after the president’s predecessor. It slashed funding for advertising about the open-enrollment period and cut grants to navigators. It also halved the enrollment period and shut down Healthcare.gov, the site people use to buy insurance, on several Sundays during open enrollment.

In October, Trump announced he would end payments to insurers, the so-called cost-sharing reductions, that help cover expenses for low-income customers. Without them, some insurers threatened to raise their rates or pull out of the Obamacare marketplaces. That same day, he signed an executive order encouraging the sales of skimpier insurance plans, which could undercut the more robust plans sold by Obamacare.

“Obamacare is finished. It’s dead. It's gone,” Trump said in October—just weeks before open enrollment for Obamacare began.

“That kind of misinformation is very difficult to combat in a state where most people voted for the president and tend to believe the president first,” said Shelli Quenga, the director of programs at a South Carolina navigator organization called the Palmetto Project. To persuade people that Obamacare was not quite dead yet, she would gently walk them through the “window shopping” feature of Healthcare.gov, where they could see plans that were available.

But with half as many navigators as the Palmetto Project could afford in past years, it was tough. Quenga and her colleagues simply couldn’t reach some rural parts of the state. “It makes you sad for people who need information and you know just aren’t going to get it based on where they live,” she said.

Interviews with health-care navigators across eight states this week revealed a frenzied time in which navigators were forced to do more with less. People came in confused about whether their insurance would be cut off midyear. Some received letters quoting premiums that were much higher than they turned out to be. Still, almost all said they saw enrollment figures that were better than expected. (Eleven states have extended deadlines for enrolling; none of the navigators I interviewed were based in those states.)

Before open enrollment starts, navigators go to community events and phone bank to raise awareness about the Affordable Care Act. In some places, they also place radio, TV, and social-media ads. Much of that advertising effort was reduced this year, some said, because of the cuts to their grants.

Holdrege, in Utah, doubled down: She and her colleagues made flyers and spent part of September calling back past clients to tell them to come in during the new, 45-day period.

Others simply pared down the number of counties they worked in, or laid off staff. This year, the Utah Health Policy Project’s budget was cut by 60 percent just a few weeks before the start of open enrollment. “It’s a school superintendent looking at the school year, and not knowing how many teachers he can hire,” Matt Slonaker, the director of the Utah Health Policy Project, said. He said they were told their budgets were cut because of performance, which he found puzzling because they thought they had been performing well. They ended up cutting their navigator ranks in half.