A wealthy Democratic congressional candidate, who has been criticized for being out-of-step with voters in the New York district he hopes to represent, said this week that he would have voted for Obamacare.
"I would have" voted for the measure, Sean Eldridge told the Poughkeepsie Journal in a Monday interview.
That answer followed other interviews in which Hughes would not say how he would have voted if he were in Congress at the time.
In a 2013 interview with RealClearPolitics, Eldridge, the husband of Facebook co-founder and New Republic editor Chris Hughes, declined to say whether he would have supported the legislation.
He also wouldn’t say whether he would support Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D., Calif.) bid for Speaker of the House if he is elected and Democrats retake the majority.
Eldridge is running to unseat Rep. Chris Gibson (R., N.Y.), an Army veteran who has criticized Eldridge for lacking ties to the district, to which he and Hughes moved only two years ago.
"He moved into the district after the last election. He has relatively no experience. He has absolutely no ties to the districts and it shows in the issues," Gibson said in an April interview.
State regulators estimated last year that about 88,000 New Yorkers lost their health care plans as a result of new Obamacare regulations.
Despite backing the measure, Eldridge criticized some of its "unintended consequences" in his interview with the Journal.
"People are having their hours cut in some cases because the employers are doing that in some cases so they don’t have to provide coverage. That’s an issue," he said.