Downside to holding Obamacare

hostage to pay for Trumps wall?

Obamacare is more popular.

Then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump walks with

Mexican President Enrique Pea Nieto at the end of their joint
statement at Los Pinos, the official presidential residence, in
Mexico City on Aug. 31. (Dario Lopez-Mills/Associated Press)

By Greg Sargent April 24 at 10:17 AM

In theory as stipulated by President Trump countless times on

the campaign trail and as reiterated by him on Twitter over the
weekend the construction of a large wall on the United States
southern border will be paid for by the nation of Mexico. At no
point in time has Trump offered a politically feasible explanation
for how that payment will occur; in a tweet Sunday, he was more
nebulous than normal.
Follow

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Eventually, but at a later date so we can get started early, Mexico
will be paying, in some form, for the badly needed border wall.
11:44 AM - 23 Apr 2017
14,06514,065 Retweets
57,51657,516 likes
In some form Mexico will pay eventually. But in a concrete
form, Americans will pay now: with revenue collected from your
income taxes.

That is, assuming that Trumps team can persuade Congress to

allocate the necessary funding. Congress has not been
particularly eager to do so. Therefore, last week, budget director
Mick
Mulvaney introduced a new strategy from the administration. For
every dollar that Congress approves for building the wall, Trump
will accept a dollar spent on paying insurers to subsidize health
care under the Affordable Care Act. Government funding is central
to the Affordable Care Acts viability, and if the administration
were to oppose that funding, the health-care program would be
severely undercut. In other words, the administration hopes to
use Democrats support for the Affordable Care Act Obamacare
as leverage for getting them to approve funding for the wall.
With less than a week to pass a new spending bill, negotiations
between the White House, Republicans and Democrats are
ramping up to avoid a government shutdown on April 29.(Jenny
Starrs/The Washington Post)

The political challenge here? Obamacare is quite a bit more

popular than Trumps wall.

Over the course of 2016 and into this year, Obamacares

popularity increased. Polls gathered by Huffington Post
Pollster show that rise over the past 12 months or so, a function in
part of the increased threat posed to the program by unified
Republican control of Washington.
The Kaiser Family Foundation has been polling on the legislation
since it was passed. In April 2016, 38 percent of the country had a
favorable opinion of the Affordable Care Act; by this month, the
figure had jumped to 46 percent. In fact, in March, nearly half the
country viewed the Affordable Care Act positively.

Unsurprisingly, theres a split in the views of Democrats and

Republicans on the subject. In April, 74 percent of Democrats
viewed it positively. In March, at the peak of support since July
2010, nearly 1 in 5 Republicans viewed the legislation positively.
(In April, that fell to 15 percent.)
Compare that with polling on Trumps wall.
Both CNN and Quinnipiac University asked Americans if they
thought that funding for the wall should move forward. In early
March, 39 percent of respondents agreed that it should, according
to CNN (and its polling partner ORC).

The strongest support was offered by those who said theyd voted
for Trump. Three-quarters of Republicans agreed that the funding
should be a priority. However, only a third of independents and
about 1-in-10 Democrats agreed that the spending should
happen.
In late March, Quinnipiac found that only 35 percent of Americans
felt that wall spending should move forward. Again, most
Republicans agreed, but only 31 percent of independents and 6
percent of Democrats agreed.
In other words, polling in March showed that 49 percent of
Americans supported Obamacare to 39 percent who wanted to
spend on the wall, according to the higher numbers in that CNN-
ORC poll. About 45 percent of independents viewed Obamacare
positively, but only 34 percent of that group wanted to spend on
the wall. Given that soft support from independents is one of the
main reasons Trumps approval rating is historically low, that
seems significant.

An interesting Fox News poll from last month asked people to rank
what they hoped Trump would accomplish. Even among
Republicans and Trump voters, building the wall was a lower
priority.
Were comparing a few kinds of apple here, of course. But
generally, polling suggests that Obamacare is more popular than
the wall, with every group except Trumps core base of support.
Thats probably part of whats happening here: Because Trumps
focus from the outset of his campaign has been to appeal to the
same central core of the American electorate, that hes
threatening something moderately popular on behalf of
something fairly unpopular makes sense, given that opinions are
flipped among the voters who pushed him over the finish line.
Over the short term, thats a low-risk strategy for Trump. Over the
longer term? We will see.

What would make all of this easier, of course, is if someone else

would step in and pays for the wall. Maybe it will happen
eventually.
Posted by Thavam