In the waning days of the debate over health care legislation, the White House’s political team did a fairly good job of convincing Democrats in Congress, Washington reporters, and like-minded writers that the act would somehow get a lot more popular after it was actually signed into law. The latest CNN poll (PDF) shows that is not really happening–opinions about the health care law, in general and specific, are little changed.

Currently, only 40 percent favor the new health care law, while 56 percent oppose it. This represents only a modest improvement over late March, when the law polled at 39 percent in favor, 59 percent opposed. The poll has found that opposition to the legislation from the left has remained effectively unchanged. In March, 13 percent opposed the bill for not being liberal enough, which is identical to the 13 percent who currently dislike the law for the same reason.

Interestingly, for every three people who support the new law, there is one individual who opposed it for not being progressive enough. Of the 53 percent of people you could roughly consider to be center-left, a full 25 percent still oppose the act because it failed at being progressive.

Not only have overall opinions about the law changed little since March, support for several individual components are almost the same now as they were in February. Currently, 59 percent favor preventing insurance companies from dropping people who become ill, while back in February, the poll found 62 percent favored that provision. Fifty-eight percent of Americans today favor a provision to prevent insurers from denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions, identical to the number back in February

The heath care fight was one of the longest and most heavily debated legislative battles in decades. It gave people plenty of time to form firm opinions about the law, and, not surprisingly (to me, at least), the opinions didn’t change simply because the bill passed. Democrats hoping time would magically make the law popular are out of luck. Of course, if the law actually started directly doing something for millions of Americans, I could see that moving opinions, but, in their infinite wisdom, Democrats delayed almost all benefits until 2014. Somehow, Democrats convinced themselves helping people with health care during the greatest economic downturn in decades was nowhere near as important as a pretty CBO score.