A month ago I took a look at Obamacare approval levels and wasn’t too impressed at the spike since Trump’s election. The increase was pretty small, and it was hard to tell if it was sustainable. So let’s take another look:
I don’t usually look at the “Less Smoothing” version of Pollster’s charts, but I’m doing it this time to try and get a sense of what’s been happening recently. This time, it really does look like there’s been a genuine change since Election Day, somewhere in the range of 5-6 points. Both Kaiser and Pew, which have conducted high-quality tracking polls for a long time, show the same thing. Pew breaks down the results by party, and it turns out the increase is due almost entirely to Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents:
In the past year, approval levels have increased 7 points among Democrats and 14 points among independents. Breaking this down further, approval has spiked a whopping 20 points among Democratic-leaning independents. By contrast Republican-leaning independents are up only slightly and Republicans haven’t budged even a single point.
In other words, now that Obamacare is under serious attacks, more lefties are finally deciding it’s worth defending after all. Finally.
