Romneycare's Popularity Plummets

Grace-Marie Turner speaks for many in expressing frustration with Mitt Romney’s inability to let go of his failed Massachusetts health-care “reform.” President Obama himself has frequently asserted that Obamacare is partly based on the so-called conservative ideas encompassed in Romneycare. New polling results from the Bay State might make the president rethink this approach, and give Romney more confidence to admit his error.

A recent poll from Suffolk University and WHDH-TV reports that 49 percent of respondents do not believe Romneycare has helped, while only 38 percent believe that it is working. Fifty-four percent said that Romney’s signing the law likely hurt his presidential chances, while only 22 percent believed that it helped.

This is a pretty dramatic shift. A July 2008 poll, conducted two years after the law was signed, showed 69 percent favoring the law and only 22 percent opposed. A year later, another survey reported similar results.

In contrast, Obamacare has never cracked 50 percent in the polls. If Romneycare can fall from over two-thirds support two years after its passage to under 50 percent less than five years after it, it suggests that we have not yet begun to see the depths of unpopularity that Obamacare can plumb.

(Crossposted from National Review Online.)