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Poll: Obamacare a 2016 campaign issue?

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2016 presidentRepublicans would love Obamacare to be a campaign issue this fall. They will be disappointed.

New polling from Public Policy Polling has Americans equally divided on the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, with 42 percent of Americans supporting the healthcare reform, 42 percent opposed, and 16 percent undecided.

Republicans tried, unsuccessfully, to make the 2012 presidential election a referendum on Obamacare, then after losing the White House in November still played politics with the reform into the second Obama term.

This polling would suggest that waving the bloody flag of Obamacare yet again will prove fruitless, but those kinds of things don’t seem to matter to GOP strategists.

Elsewhere in Issueville, we have the minimum wage, which even the Republican base seems to think needs to be augmented, with 61 percent of Republicans surveyed agreeing that the minimum wage needs to be raised to at least $10 an hour.

And then we get to background checks on gun sales: again, an area where even Republican voters, by a 79-14 margin, are supportive.

Finally, a nitpicking issue if there ever was one, but we hear a lot from elected Republicans about the invasive EPA Clean Power Plan. Eh, maybe don’t play this one, either. Republican voters, marginally, oppose the Clean Power Plan, by a not-exactly-base-firing 49-43 margin, but independent voters support the plan by a 65-29 margin.

Story by Chris Graham

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