For one, many people had a limited understanding of what the ACA was and how it functioned. This was partly due to a gross negativity and disinformation campaign undertaken by the GOP. However, it was abetted by the media which did a piss poor job of presenting the real story. The end result was a pretty unfair assessment of the bill in polling.
Second (and I think the most important), the polling that was done was horribly incomplete. Hundreds of polls were done that showed the popularity of the ACA was under 50%. However, very few went on to ask the BLATANTLY obvious next question "Why?"
When asked, there was a solid 10-15% that said it did not go far enough.
The fact that this was never seriously addressed is travesty
Here is an example poll from October 2013 right before the law went into effect http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2013/images/10/21/rel12a.pdf
First question Favor 41% / Oppose 56%. Then when asked the second question, 12% said because it was not liberal enough
The messaging should have been that +/- 50-60% wanted Obamacare or BETTER.
It should be noted, that example is illustrative in a number of ways. When asked to choose why they opposed it, an additional 6% said they had no opinion (beyond the 3% in the original question). So it is clear to me that 6% of the people didn't even know why they were opposing it and were simply reacting to all the negative coverage.
The bottom line is that the support was never as low as the press and polling made it seem. This fight has had the benefit of showing the inherent popularity that was never shown before.
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