Polls are hilarious, when weighed against how much people even understand what it is they're giving their opinion on. Affordable Care Act is a great example. It has an overall negative poll rating, but each of the individual components has overwhelmingly positive poll numbers. Polls show that Americans are to the left of what is considered mainstream in the conventional wisdom, but you can only tell by teasing out of them that it's not that great of an idea to get constantly ass fucked by rich people.
You have to counter a massive propaganda system that demonizes buzzwords in order to make it easier to extract wealth. Edit: Also the Affordable Care Act doesn't have negative favorability. Last I check it was ~37% disapproval. Whereas Obamacare has 47% disapproval.