Maybe the Election Won’t Be About Obamacare After All - By Jonathan Chait

Since at least October, the assumption has held that the midterm elections will revolve thematically around Obamacare. A series of new developments is suddenly making that once-rock-solid assumption look questionable.

To date, Republicans have made good on their vow to make the elections a referendum on the health-care law. It simply hasn’t worked very well. The Party remains poised for a strong showing due to its reinforcing structural advantages: Senate races staged in overwhelmingly friendly terrain, a Republican-tilted House map, and an ingrained tendency of Democratic voters to skip midterm elections. Still, the GOP’s odds of winning control of the Senate have fallen from 60 percent a month ago, per Nate Silver, to a pure toss-up per the New York Times model. (FiveThirtyEight has not updated its model, but would likely yield a similar conclusion.)

The single-minded focus on Obamacare may not be to blame, but it sure doesn’t seem to be helping. The website has been fixed, enrollment is exceeding expectations, and the torrent of horrendous news coverage has ceased. Republicans have hoped the number of Obamacare victims would outnumber the beneficiaries, and some are still clinging to that hope. But the number of people who lost their coverage turns out to be much smaller than previously believed, as Jonathan Cohn points out.

Obamacare remains unpopular. The trouble for Republicans is that repealing Obamacare remains unpopular, too. The New York Times poll of red-state Senate battlegrounds Arkanasas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and North Carolina illustrates the paradoxical state of public opinion. People have little grasp of what the law actually entails, with strong pluralities believing Obamacare does not provide financial help for people with low income to purchase insurance (which is, of course, the law’s central provision). Majorities disapprove of the law. But, by margins ranging from 2 points to 25 points, they prefer that Congress “work to improve the law” rather than “work to repeal the law and replace it with something else.” State Medicaid expansion is overwhelmingly popular. In Kentucky, outspokenly pro-Obamacare governor Steve Beshear commands a 56-29 approval rating.

more
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/maybe-the-election-wont-be-about-obamacare.html