Obamacare Continues to be a Drag on Democrats

Even in blue state races where
Democrats are currently running ahead, opposition to Obamacare is
far stronger than support. 

As The Washington Post
notes, new polling from NBC-Marist shows that Sen. Mark Udall,
a Democrat from Colorado, and Rep. Gary Peters, a Democrat from
Michigan who is running for Senate, are both holding leads.

But even in these relatively blue states, both of which went for
President Obama in 2012, Obamacare doesn’t seem to be helping. Via
the Post:

In Colorado, 46 percent of voters say they “strongly” believe
that passing Obamacare was a bad idea. And in blue-leaning
Michigan, 44 percent agree.

This only captures the extremes—those who believe passing the
health law was strongly a good idea or strongly a bad idea. But
it’s indicative of where the intensity is, as well as the difficult
time that Democrats have had converting the law into a political
success, even as the major public failures of last fall have been
smoothed over. 

You can see something similar at work in North Carolina, where
Sen. Kay Hagan, a potentially vulnerable Democrat who has sometimes
been portrayed
as a strong advocate of the health law because of her arguments
for expanding Medicaid, is being
hammered for her support of the law by her opponent, North
Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis. North Carolina obviously isn’t
a blue state, but it is the state with the third-highest Obamacare
enrollment in states that relied on the federal exchange. 

Yet Hagan doesn’t really highlight her vote for Obamacare. And
when
asked about the issue by Politico, a spokesperson for
the campaign brought up the candidate’s support for “fixes to the
health care law to make it work better.” Hagan even took the
unusual step earlier this year of sending out an anti-Obamacare
mailer against
her Republican counterpart, needling him for once having called the
health law “a great idea.” 

This isn’t totally unexpected. Obamacare has always struggled in
the polls. Democrats have been
pushing the empty “fix-it” line for a while. And in the special
election in Florida’s 13th congressional district, which was fought
partially over Obamacare, a little known Republican candidate came
from way behind to beat a Democrat with a lot of name value. Sink’s
support for the law was
wishy-washy, but even still, distancing herself from it didn’t
seem to help. That’s the problem for at least some Democrats this
November. They can’t back too far away from the law, but, given the
energy of the opposition, they can’t easily support it
either.