If you were wondering if Senate Republicans would manage to craft a bill that is less well received than the House GOP's Trumpcare bill (which polled at around 17 percent approval rating), Senate Republicans handed their beer off and did it.
A new USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll found that the number of people who approve of the Senate GOP's bill is roughly equivalent to the number of people who believe the Apollo moon landing was shot on a sound stage.
But that's not necessarily what I want to highlight here. What I want to talk about is the incoherence of Republican voters.
Just 12% of Americans support the Senate Republican health care plan, a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds, amid a roiling debate over whether the GOP will deliver on its signature promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. [...]
But the dilemma for the GOP is this: Eight in 10 Republicans support repeal, and close to a third say the law should be repealed even if a replacement health care plan isn't ready yet. Just 11% of independents and 2% of Democrats feel that way. [...]
Even among Republicans, only 26% support the Senate bill; 17% oppose it. A 52% majority say they need more information before they can express a view.
If 80 percent of Republicans still believe Obamacare should be repealed, and if only 26 percent support the Senate GOP's bill, we can gather that Republican voters don't actually have any idea what's in the bill or they don't really know what Obamacare is. Or both.
The Senate GOP's bill more or less is a plan to repeal the overwhelming majority of Obamacare. Only a small handful of Republican senators have raised alarms over the number of people who would lose their coverage under their bill. The vast majority of Republicans in Congress aren't even pretending that Obamacare should be replaced with something that affords equal or better coverage. On the contrary, Speaker Paul Ryan has made it quite clear that millions of people losing their coverage is a feature, not a bug. People who lose their coverage are just exercising their "freedom" he says.
Republican members of Congress should go directly to their constituents and ask them what they want because contradictory poll results like this aren't going to tell them anything conclusive.
What many GOP voters apparently want (more coverage) is also the thing they claim to hate because they've been trained to hate it.