Everyone knows the CW about the midterm elections this November: the Republicans will ride a wave of anti-Obama sentiment to win a majority in the Senate while increasing their existing majority in the U.S. House. All they have to do is keep the focus on the despised "Obamacare" and the Dems are sunk.
If you are depressed by the prospect, here is a tune you can whistle in the dark. Polling data from gubernatorial races around the country indicate that several of the Affordable Care Act's most fanatical opponents--sitting Republican governors who blocked the provision allowing for Medicaid expansion in their states--are in deep electoral doodoo. Two of them, Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania and Sam Brownback of Kansas (Kansas!), are almost certain to lose. Paul LePage, of Maine, has also consistently trailed in the polls, and Nathan Deal of Georgia and Scott Walker of Wisconsin are ahead in their races by statistically equivocal margins. Meanwhile, Republican governors who allowed the Medicaid expansion in their states--Susanna Martinez (New Mexico), Rick Snyder (Michigan), John Kasich (Ohio)--appear poised to win re-election.
The author, Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium, doesn't think the data prove that Obamacare has attained wide acceptance. Rather, opposition to the Medicaid expansion is a stand-in for devotion to hard-line conservative orthodoxy, which is even less popular than the President. Brownback's problem, for example, is not that he hates Obamacare; it's that he slashed taxes without giving a thought to arithmetic, with the result that Kansas's budget is even redder than its voters.
Perhaps, despite all we hear about our "broken politics," it's still the case that people prefer what works to what doesn't, and that, to some degree anyway, election results reflect this prejudice. Republicans aren't running against Social Security today even though the whole idea behind it is anathema to them. (It's a gigantic wealth redistribution program run by the federal government.) In the long run, good policies are good politics.
