OBAMACARE FOES LOSE ZEAL FOR REPEAL AND REPLACE

it has left a number of conservative activists saying I’m not advocating for this,” said David Bozell, president of Foramerica, an organization founded in 2010, the year the Affordable Care Act was passed, to help spread conservative ideas on social media.

These activists want the subsidies that help people buy insurance repealed, not just reduced. They want the Medicaid expansion eliminated, not slowed.

“You’re not going to get a grass-roots activist to spend their valuable time calling their senator because, ‘Well, this is better than nothing,’” Bozell said.

Public opinion polls show support for repeal-and-replace slipping among the very groups that once demanded it. Support for the Republicans’ efforts among Trump supporters, while still a healthy 55 percent, dropped 14 percentage points since May, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll in mid-june. Among Republicans overall, support had dropped 11 points, to 56 percent. Just 8 percent of Republicans polled thought repeal should be the top priority of Congress and the president.

While Republicans have become more lukewarm on their party’s efforts, Democrats are more fiercely defending the Affordable Care Act. Fifty-three percent of Democrats in the Kaiser poll had a “very favorable” view of the health care law, while 21 percent of Republicans had the same view of their party’s plan to repeal it. In May 2010, two months after the law passed, 30 percent of Democrats had a very favorable view of it. Republi- cans were heatedly against it: 69 percent had a “very unfavorable view.”

“There’s definitely an enthusiasm gap,” said Liz Hamel, director of public opinion and survey research for Kaiser, a nonpartisan research group. “It’s not that they’re not interested in repeal,” she said. “They just have other priorities.”

In the June poll, 74 percent of Republicans said their families would be better off without the health care law. But a majority expressed support for its major provisions: 59 percent want the federal government to continue prohibiting insurers from charging more to people with pre-existing conditions; 52 percent said the federal government should continue to require insurance plans to cover a list of “essential health benefits,” like maternity care and treatment for drug abuse.

Advertising, too, has been one-sided against the Republican legislation. Groups from Planned Parenthood to AARP have bought television and radio spots in states with wavering Republicans imploring them to vote against the plan. Groups on the right were mostly silent; Freedomworks has run digital ads in Tennessee alone, showing Sen. Bob Corker, who has criticized his fellow Republicans for proposing to eliminate the act’s 3.8 percent tax on investment income, cozying up to President Barack Obama.

Like Republican lawmakers, some of the groups have found that fixing complex legislation is far more challenging than opposing it. “It’s easier to generate a crowd when you don’t have to be in on the sausage-making,” said Adam Brandon, president of Freedomworks.

“The Democrats, their strategy is outrage,” he said. “I get that strategy. I lived that strategy. It’s a unifying strategy to be outraged at the other guy. The hard part is when you get in and have to deliver.”

Jenny Beth Martin, president and co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, said the group’s email blasts against Obamacare still trigger hundreds of responses from activists angry about it. The group helped make more than 100,000 phone calls over 48 hours when the House was voting on its bill in the beginning of May to repeal and replace.

But, she said, “We’re not yet on the yes side with what the Senate is doing.”

Grass-roots activists like Pat Daugherty, who once marched on Washington against Obamacare, now sound as disgusted with Republicans in Congress as they were in the early days of the Tea Party, when they helped primary challenges against lawmakers they derided as “Republicans in Name Only.”

“Every Republican in Congress ran on repealing Obamacare,” said Daugherty, a retired university administrator in Athens, Georgia. “Why do we suddenly have a hard time repealing Obamacare when Republicans are in the majority?

“I know a lot of conservatives who are more upset with Republicans than with Democrats,” she said.