“Republicans are running-scared on healthcare, erasing all words associated with healthcare from their websites, switching up their talking points, and refusing to hold healthcare town halls,” said DCCC Spokesman Tyler Law. “But they can’t hide from their votes to dismantle affordable healthcare and the reality that Americans will be hit with massive premium sticker shock immediately before the midterm election. There’s no question that Democrats are on offense on healthcare.”
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Republicans lose their favorite campaign message: Repealing Obamacare
Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/republicans-lost-their-favorite-campaign-message-repealing-obamacare/2018/04/14/c81f3dcc-3dbe-11e8-974f-aacd97698cef_story.html
Michigan GOP Rep. Mike Bishop’s campaign website doesn’t mention Obamacare, even though Web archives show it once prominently featured promises to vigorously fight the 2010 health-care law.
Kentucky GOP Rep. Garland “Andy” Barr touted repealing the Affordable Care Act as one of three top priorities when first running for Congress in 2012. Now his website focuses on tax cuts and job creation instead.
In her first House bid in 2014, Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock (R) said her campaign was about growing the economy, creating jobs and “repealing and replacing Obamacare.” She’s not talking about that anymore.
For the first time in nearly a decade, Republican candidates across the country find themselves bereft of what was once their favorite talking point: repealing and replacing President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act — and all the havoc they alleged it has wreaked.
That’s because the GOP failed dramatically in its efforts last year to roll back the ACA as its first big legislative delivery on the promise of single-party control of Washington from Congress to the White House. That defeat has quickly turned attacks on Obamacare from centerpiece into pariah on the campaign trail, a sudden disappearing act that Democrats are looking to exploit as they seek to regain power in the midterms.
“Yeah, we probably can’t talk credibly about repeal and replace anymore,” said Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.), a key negotiator of the House-passed version of an ACA rollback that failed in the Senate.
[…] The problem for the GOP is that a majority of the public wants to move toward more government control of health care. A Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll released Friday found 51 percent of all Americans, including 54 percent of independents, support a national health plan.
Armed with such evidence, Democrats are eager to seize the moment after years of defending Obamacare, trying to sell it to a somewhat skeptical public and weathering criticism as premiums spiked and insurers dropped out of the marketplaces. And there is evidence that voters see health care as a top issue heading into the midterms, with a HuffPost-YouGov poll showing that most voters picked health care as one of their top two issues in 2018.
Now, the Democrats don’t have to sell Obamacare. Instead, they can target the widely unpopular repeal-and-replace bills passed by the House and tanked by the Senate, which included banner items like curtailing Medicaid expansion in states that adopted it under the ACA.
[…] In October, for instance, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ran ads on MSNBC and CNN targeting now outgoing House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and his conference for trying to loosen protections for those with preexisting conditions, allow higher insurance premiums for older Americans and ease lifetime limits on coverage.
The DCCC ran radio ads around the same time in 11 GOP-held House districts also charging Republicans’ health-care approach would “gut Medicaid and treatment for opioid addiction.
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