Quick flashback to a Washington Post report, showing that Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives because of their Obamacare vote:
A top Democrat acknowledged Thursday that President Obama’s health care bill hurt his party in 2010. And a new study suggests it cost the Democrats something pretty specific: their House majority.
“It was clearly a liability in the last election in terms of the public’s fear,” House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Thursday during a briefing with reporters.
The study, by five professors from institutions across the country, looks at the health care bill alongside other contentious votes in the 111th Congress and determines that, more so than the stimulus or the cap-and-trade energy bill, it cost Democrats seats. In fact, they lost almost exactly the number of seats that decided the majority.
The study ran 10,000 simulations of a scenario in which all vulnerable Democrats voted against the health care bill and found that the rejections would have saved Democrats an average of 25 seats, which would have made the House parties close to a tie. (Republicans won 63 seats overall, but the study suggests around 25 of them would have been salvaged.)
Depending on what polls you look at, either a majority or plurality of Americans continue to be opposed to the Obamacare law Democrats passed, and suffered massive defeats for passing, in the 2010 midterm elections.
Democrats in 2013, are concerned about the "political price" they will pay in the 2014 midterms due to the roll-out of Obamacare and the continued unpopularity of the healthcare law Democrats and Obama forced on Americans.
Democrats in both houses of Congress said some members of their party were getting nervous that they could pay a political price if the rollout of the law was messy or if premiums went up significantly.
President Obama’s new chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough, fielded questions on the issue for more than an hour at a lunch with Democratic senators.
Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, who is up for re-election next year, said, “We are hearing from a lot of small businesses in New Hampshire that do not know how to comply with the law.”
In addition, Mrs. Shaheen said, “restaurants that employ people for about 30 hours a week are trying to figure out whether it would be in their interest to reduce the hours” of those workers, so the restaurants could avoid the law’s requirement to offer health coverage to full-time employees.
The White House officials “acknowledged that these are real concerns, and that we’ve got to do more to address them,” Mrs. Shaheen said.
Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa and chairman of the appropriations subcommittee on health care, said he was extremely upset with Mr. Obama’s decision to take money from public health prevention programs and use it to publicize the new law, which creates insurance marketplaces in every state.
“I am greatly disappointed — beyond upset — that the administration chose to help pay for the Affordable Care Act in fiscal year 2013 by raiding the Public Health and Prevention Fund,” Mr. Harkin said.
Democrats are right to be worried because as their votes for Obamacare, against the will of the majority of Americans, cost them the House in 2010, it could very well cost them control of the Senate in 2014.
Out of the 21 Democratic Senate seats that are on the ballot in the 2014 midterm elections, 14 of them voted for Obamacare in 2009 (Roll call here), excluding those retiring.
Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), both quoted above expressing concerns, voted for Obamacare as well.
The others are Mark Begich (D-AK), Mark Pryor (D-AR), Mark Udall (D-CO), Richard Durbin (D-IL), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Al Franken (D-Minn), Tom Udall (D-NM), Kay Hagan (D-NC), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Jack Reed (D-RI), Tim Johnson (D-SD), and Mark Warner (D-VA).
If the GOP leadership is smart, with every new study showing that health claims will spike an average 32% under ObamaCare, with some states seeing claims rise as much as 80%, they will hammer home the point that the Democratic Senators listed above, all on the 2014 midterm ballot, voted for it.
Republicans have an opportunity to capitalize on the fact that Obamacare is still highly unpopular and as the more egregious aspects of Obamacare are felt throughout the country, they should be linking each and every one of them to the Democrats that voted for it and were not on the ballot in the 2010 midterms.
There should already be television ads hammering the point home.
Example- TV Ad:
Narrator- Alaska health insurance premiums have risen 30%-80% due to Obamacare and Senator Mark Begich voted for it.
The RNC has a prime opportunity to take control of the Senate in 2014, what are they waiting for?