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Republicans Can’t Win By Attacking Health Care In 2014

Republicans Can’t Win By Attacking Health Care In 2014

For me, the fact that Republicans keep using the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – as a political football is a tragedy. Sure, the law has problems, but it is already saving lives and improving the health of millions of Americans.

Thankfully, it seems that Republicans who are counting on attacking the health reform system to get them into the end zone will be stopped short of the goal line based on numbers coming out of a March special election for a Florida House seat

For me, the Affordable Care Act comes down to people’s lives and health. Consider the story of a young man I met who told me that this new avenue to becoming insured had saved his life.

He had some symptoms that made him worry about his health. But he, like many Americans without insurance, ignored them, as he couldn’t afford to see the doctor. After the Affordable Care Act became law, he got coverage through his parents’ health insurance plan, and on visiting a doctor, found out he had stage 4 — that’s advanced — cancer. Fortunately, he got to the doctor in time to save his life.

That young man is far from alone. As of the end of February, some 11 million Americans have health coverage under the new law. Repealing it, as Republicans continue to insist, would take away coverage from each and every one of them.

In the Florida election, Republican David Jolly said “I’m fighting to repeal Obamacare, right away.” His opponent, Democrat Alex Sink, countered, “We can’t go back to insurance companies doing whatever they want. Instead of repealing the health care law, we need to keep what’s right and fix what’s wrong.”

The key part of Sink’s message was to remind voters why people wanted health care reform in the first place. As one of Sink’s TV ads said, “Jolly would go back to letting insurance companies deny coverage.”

That’s an effective reminder of the huge problems Americans have had for decades, when insurance companies could deny care because of a pre-existing condition, charge people higher rates because they were sick, and even charge women higher rates than men. The ACA ended all that.

The candidates in Florida pushed especially hard for the votes of seniors, which is not surprising given both Florida’s high senior population and the fact that seniors vote more frequently than other age groups.

In its ads for Jolly, The Republican Congressional Campaign repeated the same misleading charge that Republicans used successfully in 2010 to scare seniors against the ACA, that it cut $716 billion from Medicare. But unlike 2010, when Democrats did not respond to attacks on the ACA, Sink pushed back.

She reminded seniors that the ACA actually provides important new Medicare benefits, including closing the infamous prescription drug “donut hole.” Sink’s ads accurately said, “His [Jolly’s] plan would even force seniors to pay thousands more for prescription drugs.”

By Election Day, voters had a clear contrast between the positions of the candidates on the ACA. It was a close election, with Jolly winning by a small margin (48.4 percent to 46.5 percent) in a district with an 11-point Republican advantage, one that has been represented by the GOP for nearly 60 years.

But polling found that independent voters in the district supported the “keep and fix” position over the “repeal” position by a margin of 57 percent to 31 percent. Sink actually gained ground over Jolly during the election on the question of which candidate had a better position on the ACA.

I am very much looking forward to the time when Congress can start having real debates on how, as Sink said, “we can keep what’s right and fix what’s wrong” with the Affordable Care Act. However, it looks like it will take at least one more election, in 2014, to get us to that point.

We will turn the corner if progressives do not sit on the sidelines, but instead welcome the debate that Republicans insist on having about repealing the ACA.

That debate is an opportunity for people to be reminded in concrete terms that the new health care program, for all its shortcomings, is about providing every American with the peace of mind that comes with having health coverage.

Richard Kirsch is a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the author of Fighting for Our Health: The Epic Battle to Make Health Care a Right in the United States. He’s also a senior advisor to USAction.

Cross-posted from Other Words

Photo: Speaker Boehner via Flickr

Keep Calm And Carry On: Jolly’s Win Does Not Presage Republican Wave

Keep Calm And Carry On: Jolly’s Win Does Not Presage Republican Wave

David Jolly won an upset victory over Democrat Alex Sink in Tuesday’s special election in Florida’s 13th congressional district, sending another Republican to the House of Representatives, and unleashing a torrent of breathless predictions that Democrats are doomed in 2014.

A National Journal article by Josh Kraushaar, titled “Why a Republican Wave in 2014 is Looking More Likely Now,” and Joe Scarborough’s declaration that “we may have something historic here happening, where you have one act [Obamacare] actually causing grave damage to a political party two midterms in a row” typify this brand of speculative political analysis.

That makes for an easy narrative, but it’s grounded in very few facts. It’s entirely possible — or even probable — that Republicans make major gains in the 2014 midterms. They may even win a Senate majority. But if they do, it will have nothing to do with what happened in Pinellas County on Tuesday night.

For starters, as political scientist Alan Abramowitz pointed out after a 2011 special election in New York — in which Republican Bob Turner upset Democrat David Weprin, prompting excited (and false) reports of an impending Republican wave in 2012 — the results of special elections do not accurately predict the results of subsequent general elections.

“An analysis of the results of all special House elections since World War II shows that while there is a weak relationship between the net party swing in special elections and the net party swing in the subsequent general election (the correlation is .32), special election results have no impact once you control for other factors such as the party of the president in midterm elections, seats held by the parties going into the election and the incumbent president’s approval rating,” Abramowitz wrote.

A quick look at the specifics of Florida’s special election makes it clear that this contest is no exception.

First, turnout was very low. Just 183,634 voters cast ballots in the election, down from 329,347 in the 2012 general election, and 266,934 in the 2010 midterm. To be clear, Republicans — who have a narrow registration advantage in the district — did a much better job getting their voters out to the polls than Democrats did. But Florida Democrats’ failure to convince voters to turn out for Alex Sink in March tells us exceedingly little about, say, Alaska Democrats’ ability to get out the vote for Mark Begich in November.

Second, there’s no evidence that Obamacare — which has been widely labeled as the hinge on which the election swung — actually served as a decisive factor in the election. There is no exit polling available for the race, but polls leading up to election day suggested that voters had other priorities; a Februrary Tampa Bay Times/Bay News 9/WUSF Public Media poll, for example, found that while 39 percent said the Affordable Care Act was “very important” to their voting preference, 33 percent said it was just “somewhat important,” and 26 percent said it is “not at all important” (in fairness, that poll also said that Sink would win).

And while the Affordable Care Act featured prominently in the barrage of television ads that saturated the airwaves throughout the campaign, it was hardly the sole focus of the race. In fact, Jolly didn’t even mention the law in his victory speech, choosing instead to focus on his commitment to local issues.

But even if it turns out that Obamacare did seal the victory for Jolly, there’s no reason to assume that the issue will spark a Republican wave. As Abramowitz reminds us, the way that 180,000 Floridians feel about the law in March tells us very little about how some two million voters in North Carolina or Georgia will feel about it eight months from now. And national polls suggest that the law is not set up to be a clear electoral winner for either party.

Finally, in Florida’s election, one must consider Libertartian candidate Lucas Overby, who won about 5 percent of the vote. As Nick Gillespie points out in Reason, Overby’s platform makes it very plausible that he pulled more votes away from Sink than he did from Jolly (in the same manner that Libertarian Robert Sarvis pulled more votes from Democrat Terry McAuliffe than he did from Republican Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia’s recent gubernatorial election). Again, with no exit polls, it’s impossible to know for sure. But there’s a chance that were Overby not in the race, Sink would have won. If that were the case, would the media be running with overheated reports that Democrats will be in the catbird seat come November?

There’s no question that Sink’s loss should be a major disappointment for Democrats, who squandered a real shot at winning a seat that Republicans have held for decades. And there’s also no question that Democrats, saddled by an unfriendly electoral map and an unpopular president, are in danger of suffering big losses in the midterms. But there is simply no reason to believe that last night’s result provides a roadmap for future elections across the nation. If Republicans do make big gains in November, it will have nothing to do with David Jolly or Alex Sink.

Photo: Cherie Diez/Tampa Bay Times/MCT

Absentee Ballots Look Like Bad News For GOP Candidate In Florida

Absentee Ballots Look Like Bad News For GOP Candidate In Florida

The polls won’t close in the special election to replace the late U.S. Representative Bill Young (R-FL) until March 11, but absentee ballots are already pouring in — and they appear to be bad news for Republican nominee David Jolly.

As the Tampa Bay Times’ Adam Smith reports, Pinellas county voters had cast over 64,000 absentee ballots as of Wednesday. Of those, 42 percent came from Republicans and 39 percent came from Democrats.

That 3 percent edge may appear to be good news for Jolly, but it’s actually very concerning for Republicans. As Smith explains, in 2012, Republicans led Democrats in the absentee ballot count by more than 6 percent. In 2010 — the GOP wave election that Jolly and his party hope to replicate in 2014 — Republicans sent in 11 percent more ballots than Democrats did.

According to the most recent polling of the race, Democratic nominee Alex Sink holds a 42 to 35 percent lead over Jolly, with Libertarian Lucas Overby garnering 4 percent of the vote. The poll also found that 16 percent of Republicans support Sink while just 8 percent of Democrats support Jolly, providing even more cause for Jolly to be concerned with Republicans’ surprisingly low turnout.

The special election is the most significant event on the electoral calendar until the November midterms; as such, it has attracted a staggering amount of outside spending — mostly supporting Jolly and attacking Sink — leaving Republicans optimistic that a significant number of voters could shift towards Jolly in the campaign’s final days.

Screenshot via YouTube

Poll: Democrat Sink Leads In Florida Special Election

Poll: Democrat Sink Leads In Florida Special Election

Democrat Alex Sink holds a slight lead over Republican David Jolly in Florida’s hotly contested special election for U.S. House, according to a new Tampa Bay Times/Bay News 9/WUSF Public Media poll of likely voters in the state’s 13th congressional district.

The poll finds Sink with a 42 to 35 percent advantage over Jolly; 4 percent support Libertarian candidate Lucas Overby, and 14 percent are undecided.

Those undecided voters are likely to swing the election; 81 percent of them say they are not leaning towards any candidate.

Unsurprisingly, the Affordable Care Act is serving as a dividing line between the candidates. Voters who support the law favor Sink by an 81 to 14 percent margin, while Jolly wins voters who oppose it, by 84 to 9 percent. Overall, 43 percent of those surveyed support the Affordable Care Act, while 47 percent oppose it, and 10 percent have no opinion.

Although health care reform has dominated headlines throughout the campaign — both Jolly and outside groups have trained their fire on Sink’s support for the law — it may not prove decisive in the election; 39 percent of respondents said the law’s impact on their voting preference is “very important,” while 33 percent said it is “somewhat important,” and 26 percent said it is “not at all important.”

This should alarm Republican strategists across the nation, who have seemingly decided to put all of their eggs in the “Obamacare is a train wreck” basket. Florida’s 13th district has a reputation as a national bellwether; if a quarter of voters across the nation don’t consider Obamacare to be any sort of factor in their 2014 voting decisions, then Republican candidates could be in big trouble.

As the March 11 election draws nearer, the deeply negative campaign has increasingly become a proxy battle between liberals and conservatives across the country. Outside groups have spent a staggering $1.1 million on the race in the past nine days alone, with much more expected to follow in the coming weeks. Overall, outside groups have spent $3.5 million on the campaign — $2.6 million of it in support of Jolly — making it among the most expensive races of the cycle.

The Tampa Bay Times/Bay News 9/WUSF Public Media poll surveyed 603 voters by telephone between February 4 and February 9, and has a +/- 4.0 percent margin of error.

Photo: Village Square via Flickr