NYT Poll: Even These Southern States Don’t Want Obamacare Repealed

President Barack Obama , accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden speaks about the Affordable Care Act, Tuesday, April 1, 2014, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
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Majorities of people surveyed in a trio of Southern states said they would rather keep Obamacare and improve than repeal and replace it, according to a New York Times/Kaiser Family Foundation poll released Wednesday.

Residents in Kentucky, Louisiana and North Carolina chose improving the law over repealing it and replacing it by significant margins: 52 percent to 41 percent in Kentucky, 52 percent to 44 percent in Louisiana, and a whopping 60 percent to 35 percent in North Carolina.

In a fourth state, Arkansas, a plurality said they wanted their congressional representative to work to improve the law (48 percent) instead of work to repeal the law and replace it with something else (46 percent).

The same poll found Democrats in a stronger-than-expected position in the Senate races in those four states, which will be key to determining control of the chamber next year. For context, President Obama lost three of them by at least 15 percentage points; North Carolina, where he lost by 2, was the exception.

Previous national polling has found that Americans prefer keeping and fixing Obamacare over repealing it. Surveys have also showed that Americans would like to move on from the debate over the law.

The NYT/KFF poll, conducted from April 8 to 15, surveyed 4,152 adults. Its margin of error is four percentage points in each state.

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