Recent polling, though, makes it a bit tricky to suss out just how unpopular it is. In the past few days, there have been polls on the AHCA released by Fox News, HuffPost-YouGov, Monmouth University and, on Thursday, Quinnipiac University. Support in those polls ranged from 40 percent saying they approved of the bill strongly or somewhat in Fox’s poll to only 19 percent who said the same in Quinnipiac’s survey. (Monmouth, unlike the other three polls, only offered an approve/disapprove response.)

What’s going on? How could there be a 21-point range on the same question across four surveys?

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One key thing that’s going on is that the polls used different language to ask the question — and that likely made a big difference.

Fox, for example, told respondents that “the U.S. House passed legislation that would replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.” Republicans broadly had more positive views of the legislation than Democrats and independents, but 13 percent of the former and more than a third of the latter approved at least somewhat.

Monmouth posed the question in a similar way.

Notice the gap between the positive and negative responses. That’s the percentage of respondents who said they didn’t have an opinion or know enough to offer one. In Monmouth’s poll, that gap is wider than in Fox’s — which is one reason that the percentage expressing approval in Fox’s poll is higher.

The HuffPost-YouGov poll, though, added an element to the question. “Republican leaders in the House of Representatives,” it asked, “recently passed a new health care bill.” Where Fox showed 28 percent strong support, strong support in the HuffPost poll was only 6 percent.

Quinnipiac, the poll with the most negative responses of the four, mentioned Republicans twice.

Notice that a lot of respondents in the latter two polls had no opinion, substantially more than in the Fox poll, for example.

Interestingly, that same gap wasn’t apparent when both Quinnipiac and Fox (both of which surveyed registered voters) asked about approval numbers for President Trump. In fact, views of Trump’s job performance between the Fox and Quinnipiac polls were nearly identical across party.

In Fox’s poll, 40 percent of all voters approved strongly or somewhat of Trump’s job performance. In Quinnipiac, the number was 37 percent. The party split for Fox was 81/35/7 percent approval for Republicans/independents/Democrats. In Quinnipiac’s? 83/36/6.

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But on the AHCA, that wide gulf. Even if you assume that those who offered no opinion in Quinnipiac’s poll split the same way as the rest of the population, only about 25 percent of those who had any opinion in that survey had a positive view of the legislation — well below where Fox was.

For those of us observing from the outside, this is an interesting little finding. For Republicans worried about the political effects of the American Health Care Act, it’s a big old warning flag. People who hear repeatedly that the bill is a Republican one are much less likely to support it.