WASHINGTON — While insisting they’ve not abandoned their goal of repealing President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, Republicans are increasingly talking about “repairing” it as they grapple with disunity, drooping momentum and uneasy voters.

The GOP triumphantly shoved a budget through Congress three weeks ago that gave committees until Jan. 27 to write bills dismantling the law and substituting a Republican plan. Everyone knew that deadline was soft, but now leaders are talking instead about moving initial legislation by early spring.

And as the party struggles to translate its longtime political mantra into legislation that can pass Congress, some Republicans have started using different language to describe the effort.

“It’s repairing the damage ObamaCare has caused. It’s more accurate” than repeal and replace, said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who chairs the Senate health committee. He notes that President Donald Trump and many Republicans want to keep popular pieces of the overhaul like requiring family policies to cover children up to age 26.

“It probably lessens people’s anxiety that we won’t pull the rug out from under them,” Rep. Pat Tiberi, R-Ohio, who chairs a House health subcommittee, said of the term “repair.”

The refined rhetoric comes as much of Washington’s focus has shifted to Trump’s nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court vacancy and Democratic attempts to derail GOP efforts to confirm Cabinet members. That and controversies surrounding Trump’s temporary refugee ban have sapped some energy from the health care drive.

It also comes with polls spotlighting the GOP’s risks. A recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found 53 percent want to keep Obama’s law in some form, and 56 percent are “extremely” or “very” concerned that repeal means many will lose insurance.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has been saying Republicans want to “rescue” the health system and Thursday embraced all of the competing phraseology, saying, “The best way to repair a health care system is to repeal and replace ObamaCare.”

But talk of a repair dismays other Republicans, including hard-line conservatives. They say their message since Democrats enacted the 2010 law was that the GOP would repeal it, a goal later amended to “repeal and replace.”

“You’ve got to repeal the law that’s the problem. That’s what we told the voters we were going to do,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a leader of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.