Despite President Barack Obama's pride in passing the Affordable Care Act, it looks like Democratic candidates running in the mid-term primaries this year don't share his sense of triumph.
In a surprising new research paper, only 36 percent of Democrats surveyed expressed a favorable and supportive position on Obamacare in their campaigns,
the Washington Post reports.
The Brookings Institution released the study, an exhaustive poll of 1,662 candidates in House and Senate primary elections, and found that Democrats generally didn't consider Obamacare a big campaign vote-getter, or anything to brag about.
While 73.77 percent of Republican candidates excoriated Obamacare and only 0.13 percent of those Republicans surveyed expressed support, Democrats wavered dramatically, with 25.54 percent offering a waffling position, neither strongly for nor strongly against, and 37.46 percent voicing no opinion at all.
"The positioning of Republican primary candidates for the House is quite consistent with the position of the current House of Representatives, which has voted more than 50 times
to repeal 'Obamacare,' "
the study found.
"These data offer little hope for a more moderate Congress, at least on this issue. On the Democratic side, the results were not as clear-cut. Thirty-seven percent of House Democratic primary candidates failed to mention the Affordable Care Act at all, and a quarter of those offered a nuanced position — usually along the lines of improving the Act or reforming it."
On other key issues, party lines seemed stronger. On climate change, 50.15 percent of Democrats supported "climate change mitigation" while 29.01 percent of Republicans opposed it and only 1.99 percent supported it.
On immigration reform, 46.4 percent of Democrats support comprehensive immigration reform but only 4.5 percent of Republicans agree with them, and 42.7 percent of Republicans actively oppose it. Just 0.93 percent of Democrats oppose comprehensive immigration reform.
"Unfortunately, the future is likely to look very much like the past," the study concluded.
"On the key issues candidates discussed, political polarization is alive and well. As indicated, there are some slivers of hope for a more robust discussion of health care on the Democratic side and of immigration on the Republican side – but we should not overemphasize these conclusions.
"The fact is that on the two big issues of the 2014 primaries, the political parties
are as polarized as ever."
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