Will Republicans face a midterm day of reckoning?
Republicans don’t just have a policy problem with their proposed health care plan; they’ve got a political problem: It hurts some of the older and low-income voters who helped put Donald Trump in the White House, and helps younger voters who wanted little to do with him.
Plus, features of the American Health Care Act are going to be tough to explain the next time members of Congress return home to face voters for the break that begins in April. Like how the health bill fails to do what Trump promised: “have
insurance for everybody,” keep Medicare intact and offer lower premiums, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analysis.
There is good political news for Republicans up and down the ballot: They will be able to say they fulfilled their campaign promises to kill President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. They can also point to the CBO forecast that their bill will reduce the deficit in 10 years and that premiums will drop in eight years.
But analysts, and a growing number of Republican politicians, doubt that will help voters forget how the proposed law would hit them in the wallet. And should this bill survive in close to its current form, that could hurt Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections.
“‘Repeal and replace’ was a fabulous slogan, but not a good policy,” said Jennifer Duffy, a senior editor at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report who analyzes Congressional races. “They should have said ‘repair’ instead.
“Now some of them are hell-bent over keeping the promise that they made instead of fixing the policy,” Duffy said. “If it remains as it is, it is not going to be good for Republicans in the (2018) midterms.”
Or, as Berkeley pollster John Whaley said, “Throwing 24 million people off health insurance (by 2026, according to the CBO analysis) sticks in people’s minds more than talking about reducing the budget in 10 years.”
A few Republicans are already starting to follow the CBO numbers out the door.
On Tuesday, GOP Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen tweeted, “I plan to vote NO on the current #AHCA bill. As written the plan leaves too many from my #SoFla district uninsured ... As #AHCA stands, it will cut much needed help for #SoFla’s poor + elderly populations. Need a plan that will do more to protect them.”
“That’s not what President Trump promised,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., told CNN Tuesday. “That’s not what Republicans ran on.”
Trump’s approval rating slipped to 39 percent Monday, according to a Gallup poll, while his disapproval mark climbed to 55 percent. But he continues to get high marks (56 percent according to a Morning Consult/Politico poll of registered voters) for keeping his campaign promises.
That mark is going to take a hit if voters start seeing a gap between Trump’s promises and reality on health care, although Trump won’t face voter backlash directly for these transgressions any time soon. But Republicans on the 2018 ballot will.
“Midterms are often a referendum on the president’s party,” said Nathan Gonzales, editor of the nonpartisan Inside Elections. “If voters are unhappy with President Trump or what he’s done, the only way to express their frustrations is when they vote for their member of Congress.”
Because health care affects every American family in some way, voters are very sensitive to any changes in their care or coverage. Just ask the Democrats, who are still in a hole after taking a beat-down in the midterm election after they passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010.
In 2009, shortly after Obama was elected with a Democratic majority in Congress, Gonzales counted 33 races in play for the 2010 midterms. By election day 2010, more than 100 were up for grabs — and more than 90 percent were Democratic seats, thanks in part to voter anger over the Affordable Care Act, Gonzales said.
“Opinions on this can move within a year’s time,” Gonzales said, “and still make it in time for a midterm election.”
And in California, that could mean Republicans like Rep. Darrell Issa, an eight-term incumbent from Vista (San Diego County) who won by only 1,621 votes in 2016, are in trouble. The early Inside Elections 2018 forecast describes Issa’s quest for re-election as a “toss-up.”
In a somewhat less precarious position are California Reps. Jeff Denham, R-Turlock (Stanislaus County); Steve Knight, R-Lancaster (Los Angeles County); and Ed Royce, R-Fullerton (Orange County), whose status Inside Elections classifies in the somewhatless-rickety “leans Republican” category at this early date.
But they may be the exception, as most House members — thanks to gerrymandered districts where a safe majority of voters are either Republican or Democrat — have a little bit of cushion against a voter revolt over the health care law. Duffy said only two of the 34 seats that Democrats need to retake the House in 2018 could be considered vulnerable at this early date.
In the Senate, Republicans seeking re-election in 2018, like Dean Heller, R-Nev., and Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., are going to walk a fine line on the health care measure because they’re running in states that either voted for Hillary Clinton (Nevada) or preferred Trump by a smaller margin (Arizona, where the president won by four percentage points.)
Many Senate Democrats seeking another term are facing the inverse problem. Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, Indiana Sen. Joe Donnelly, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and South Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp are Democrats running in states that Trump won by double digits. Unless the polls turn hard against the new health measure, they are going to have to try to take a stand against it, but not too strident a stand for fear of alienating their states’ Trump supporters.
One question Duffy said can’t yet be answered: Will the swing voters who backed Trump come out to vote in a midterm election where he isn’t on the ballot?
“That’s what Obama found out, twice,” Duffy said. “When he wasn’t on the ballot, a lot of his voters didn’t vote.”
And if Trump voters don’t turn for Republicans in 2018, the GOP might face the same fate as Democrats.