Since Easter is almost upon us, I guess it is a good time to talk about the wisdom of putting all your eggs in one basket or, alternatively, the wisdom of trying to make the midterm elections a referendum on ObamaCare.
But, before I get to that, I want to briefly discuss my philosophy of handling polling data. I trust polling data the least when it attempts to weigh public opinion on issues rather than electoral preferences. The reason for this is twofold. First, polling of issues is usually solicited by issue advocates and only released if a favorable result is found. Second, issue polling is literally never verified. We eventually learned exactly what the public thought about Obama vs. Romney, but we never learned exactly what the public thought about abortion rights or Bain Capital. We can judge how accurate the various pollsters were in predicting the presidential election, but we can’t ever judge how accurate they are or were in polling the issues.
Having said that, electoral polling done close to an election is the best predictor of the results, and you can use a resource like Nate Silver to get the best predictive value out of electoral polling data. I don’t believe in “skewed polls” for elections, provided that you have a system for accounting for outliers and adjusting for institutional bias. In contrast, I place little value on polls about ObamaCare that are taken now and expected to tell us how the midterms will play out.
As Greg Sargent notes, the concern about the public’s opinion of ObamaCare is less about the law’s overall popularity and more about the potential for opposition among Republicans to provide them with a motivational advantage in terms of voter turnout.
As we’ve seen with opposition to reproductive rights, it can be less important what the public as a whole thinks about an issue than how impassioned people are about the issue. Therefore, I think it’s more important to keep track of how opposed the Republican base is to ObamaCare than what the total population thinks.
As many have already pointed out, one of the most serious political problems Democrats face in 2014 is that Republicans are far more motivated by hatred of Obamacare than Dems are by their approval of the law. And some new polling just released by Pew Research captures this very nicely.
The poll’s basic finding: While a minority of Republicans say the law has personally impacted them in a negative way (39-52), Republicans overwhelmingly say the law is currently harming the country overall (69 percent) and say in even greater numbers (73 percent) that the law will harm the country overall. Republicans believe those things in far greater numbers than independents.
That perhaps helps explain the other key finding: Republicans are far more likely to say a candidate’s stance on the ACA will be “very important” to their midterm vote (64 percent) than either independents (45 percent) or Democrats (52 percent). The intensity is with the Obamacare-haters, which could help exacerbate the “midterm dropoff” problem Dems would already be facing.
If the midterms were going to be held in May, the Democrats would have a real problem.
But they aren’t going to be held in May. And the polling suggests that the Republicans have a problem that isn’t going to go away and is only going to grow worse.
The Obamacare Intensity Gap is a real problem for Dems. But the above helps explain why Republicans, too, face complications. They are constrained from advocating only for repeal, because the law’s provisions are kicking in for millions, and they are broadly popular. But they are also constrained from offering any meaningful alternative, because as Jonathan Cohn explains well, that would require supporting the tradeoffs necessary to accomplish what Obamacare accomplishes. Republicans either have to quietly back away from repeal or support ”replacing” it with something that looks a lot like Obamacare. Yet both are nonstarters because the base won’t allow for it to be anything other than an unremitting catastrophe.
Actually, the Republican strategy is dependent on ObamaCare being an unremitting (unmitigated?) disaster. This is why I talked about putting all your eggs in one basket. The law was supposed to provide health insurance that no one wanted and it was supposed to collapse of its own weight. Basically, the Republicans thought the law would work out about as well as the invasion of Iraq and that they would look wise for opposing it. That’s obviously not going to happen.
And the poll results already reflect that, with the number of people supporting complete repeal plummeting even among Republicans. And that’s a key, because the advantage the Republicans have on the issue is much more a matter of a differential advantage in base motivation than it is on the merits. A minority of Americans support the Republicans’ repeal rhetoric, and their disadvantage there is only going to grow with each passing month.
Consider the possibility that Obamacare is not all that important to Republicans, that it is just a dog-whistle for Obama.
It is a Republican plan, after all, developed at the Heritage Foundation.
Hating Obama directly is of course impolite, smells of racism.
If this is the case, does it alter our response?
Please remember something about the Heritage Foundation proposal. It was offered as a bad-faith alternative to HillaryCare that gave the GOP an excuse for not doing anything about the health care crisis at the time.
The idea was to push “personal responsibility.” You are responsible for getting health care; it shouldn’t be handed to you. Everyone ought to be responsible and get health care and not be a deadbeat freeloader.
That was the idea at the time, but it wasn’t a good faith offer. They knew it wouldn’t pass so they were willing to offer the subsidies in return for the personal mandate.
Let’s no pretend that ObamaCare is something the Republicans ever actually wanted to see become law, because they always opposed subsidizing people’s health care.
In truth there’s not that much resemblance between ACA and the Heritage plan apart from mandates (which are mathematically required by ANY “market-based” approach). Let’s kill this zombie meme. It does serious injustice to Obama’s flawed but still vitally important accomplishment.
The Democrats in Red states which didn’t decide to accept the Medicaid money, need to run on PPACA, and Medicaid.
Now, the question is, will they?
It would be a hell of a lot easier for them to do that if the beneficiaries were likely to go to the polls in a midterm year. We can’t put all the blame on the politicians.
What will be crucial is exactly what alternate reality–in other words, what calculated sequence of lies—Repubs and their Citizens United CEOs concoct and spread across the nation in the upcoming year. Right now we’ve been having a wave of “Nice Ladies Who Were Hurt [somehow] by ObammyCare” ads.
As the data shows, Repubs already have been completely programmed to believe that the ACA will severely harm Murica if it’s not massively altered to stop giving trillions to undeserving (non-white) poors, so we’ll probably be treated to oceans of false ads along these lines. The merits are meaningless, as they are far beyond the ability of the useless corporate media to explain or “fact-check”, if they had the slightest intention of doing so, which they don’t.
We know that “truth” cannot defeat lies in the polluted American teevee marketplace, it was always a dubious idea, it is not really arguable now. The teevee destroys one’s intellectual health, ha-ha. We saw the level of understanding that the electorate develops about complicated issues in the 2010 catastrophe–which was all about lies concerning the ACA. We saw that Ryan’s Repubs could get seniors (and others) to believe that Dems cut Medicare and Repubs fought to “save” it. Reality is now dispensable.
The RW are upset about Obamacare and will come out to vote. This is very true. But the Democratic party members and Independents are angry about the numerous voter suppression laws passed by the GOP. I predict that this anger will foster a major turn out on the Democratic side to vote out GOP members in retaliation. Nothing will anger and motivate a voter then trying to take something they feel (Rightly so) they are entitled to. This is one issue that by itself is a game changer.
I read somewhere the other day that the far right is already pivoting off ACA and ginning up their base with opposition to Common Core. Did I read that here in the comments? I don’t recall, sorry. Either way, they’re not going to have any difficulty getting their base to vote.
Exactly. If the ACA didn’t exist then it would be something else. They’re not in a lather about Obamacare so much as they’re in a lather about Obama.
I think the path is to run relentlessly on Democratic positions overwhelmingly supported by Americans – primarily a minimum wage increase and most especially saving Medicare from being voucherized.
Re Obamacare, it falls into the same pattern. Obamacare as a whole is not too popular, but the individual components are. We should run endless ads saying:
“<Republican Congressman x> voted 52 times to let insurance companies kick sick people off their plans”
“<Republican Congressman x> voted 52 times to kick children off their parent’s insurance”
“<Republican Congressman x> voted 52 times to deny healthcare to the working poor”
“<Republican Congressman x> voted 52 times to cancel millions of small business insurance policies”
“<Republican Congressman x> voted 52 times to deny insurance to early retirees”
“<Republican Congressman x> voted 52 times to let bad doctors cheat Medicare”
Don’t say anything about how these were the Obamacare repeal votes. Let those Republican Congressman have to say over and over again about a dozen different issues “Yes that’s a great benefit to Obamacare but I voted to end it anyway.” Every specific plank in Obamacare apart from the individual mandate is a wedge issue. Use them relentlessly.
The best tools though, is going to be the attempt to voucherize Medicare. We almost had them in 2012 until Obama let them off the hook with “Governor Romney’s and my positions aren’t too different.” We can get the House back with that one.
It’s things like this that has me questioning campaigners’ competence. The House is being gifted to the Democrats right now and they don’t have the damn sense to take it. I’m looking at the people up top real funny if we don’t have a Speaker Pelosi next year. I also notice how the “liberals” on tv never hold the leadership accountable for consistent failure. Sure they criticize Obama, but they never ask Steve Israel or Debbie Wassermann-Schultz any hard questions about the games they’re playing. It’s like they’re using Republican stupidity to keep their own jobs instead of using it against the GOP.