The Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong. Obamacare Isn't Dooming Democrats in November

[DonViejo]

PHILIP BUMP

The conventional wisdom says that the botched Obamacare rollout and the program's general unpopularity are dooming Democratic chances in November, but it's wrong. Even with Obamacare's problems compounded by multiple tweaks and delays (including the newest), Democrats would be in a similarly bad position, no matter what.

There's a good overview of the two main parties' strengths and weaknesses from Thomas Edsall in The New York Times, using the upcoming midterm elections as a way to talk about the long-term prospects of each party. It's thorough, if unsurprising: the Democratic strength with young and non-white voters is likely to be an asset in 2016 and beyond.

Edsall also pins the party's current problems on Obamacare. "The damage inflicted on the Democratic Party by the dysfunctional website and the reaction to it is hard to overestimate," he writes, noting poll data from Real Clear Politics on a generic congressional ballot. "As the figure illustrates, the generic vote shifted from a 5.5 percentage point Democratic advantage on Oct. 15, 2013, to a 2.5 percentage point Republican advantage on Dec. 2." That's a very brief version of the long-running argument: the Florida special election showed that people are freaked about the law; nearly half the country wants to repeal it.

What Edsall glosses over, though, is that the congressional ballot data was artificially inflated by the complete train wreck of the government shutdown, which completely tanked Republican poll numbers. The Healthcare.gov mess certainly meant that the Democrats lost an opportunity to capitalize on a surprising lead — a lead that was always bound to decline to some extent.

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http://www.thewire.com/politics/2014/03/the-conventional-wisdom-is-wrong-obamacare-isnt-dooming-democrats-in-november/359617/