Democrats aren’t only running away from Barack Obama for the mid-term elections, they’re bailing on his so called signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, as well.
New research from Elaine C. Kamarck and Alexander R. Podkulpaper of the Brookings Institution shows that only 36 percent of Democrats running for Congress this year are claiming to support Obamacare.
Per a Washington Post report, “Another quarter (25.5 percent) of Democrats have offered a nuanced position that wasn’t clearly in support of the law or against it, while 1 percent outright opposed it and 37 percent have offered no opinion”.
The full study also notes some other interesting breakdowns regarding the ideological alignment within both parties.
There is a regional character to the Republican factional breakdown, with 52.24 percent of Tea Party candidates
coming from the South and 21.89 percent coming from the West. On the Democratic side, Progressive Democrats
were slightly more prevalent in the Northeast and West (29.7 percent and 27.9 percent) and only slightly less
common in the South and Midwest (20.6 percent and 21.8 percent). Interestingly, of the 52 Moderate Democrats,
only 2 were from the Northeast, and the rest evenly spread across the country.On the Democratic side where almost no attention has been paid to internal divisions and where, in fact, the
internal divisions are not nearly as dramatic, a quarter of all the House candidates identified themselves as more
to the left of the party than not and very few called themselves “moderates.” But the overall impression of the
Democratic Party as less internally divided bears out in the large number of candidates who simply could not be
identified ideologically–the “other” category.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.