Democrats Are Starting to Sour on Obamacare

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The Kaiser Health Tracking Poll is always interesting because they ask questions that nobody else does. This month, for example, they ask whether you’ve mostly been hearing good things or bad things about Obamacare, and far more people say they’ve been hearing bad things than good.

Aha! It’s Fox News at work! But no. If you go to the next question, you find that Republican views of Obamacare have stayed pretty stable: most of them hate it, but they’ve hated it from the start. It’s Democrats who are slowly but steadily souring on the law. Three years ago, around 70 percent had a favorable view of Obamacare. Today that’s dropped to under 60 percent.

Why? Hard to say, since there are no questions that delve into that. Nor is there any clue about how this breaks down between middle class workers, who are mostly unaffected by Obamacare, and low-income workers, who are. Stay tuned to see if this turns around over the next 12 months, as Obamacare starts to roll out in earnest and informational campaigns start to swing into high gear.

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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