Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, tweeted an op-ed from Republican medical doctors critical of Obamacare with an accompanying message Monday afternoon.
“The issue that should sink Hillary Clinton,” she wrote of the healthcare law. If only her candidate would fire the torpedoes.
Despite a rash of negative news for Obamacare—the rising premiums, the falling number of insurers on the exchanges, the Democrats like Minnesota governor Mark Dayton and Bill Clinton calling the law “no longer affordable” and “the craziest thing in the world”—the Trump camp has focused its message elsewhere. It’s not simply a matter of Trump publicly obsessing about scandal, either his own or his opponent’s. It’s the absence of the issue in his basic campaign communications.
Obamacare has received minimal mention in Trump’s advertising since the primary season. Based on a list of ads curated by the election information website p2016.org, the notoriously commercial-averse candidate didn’t run a single advertisement about the law from January to the GOP convention in July, only cursorily pledging to “fix our health care.” He hasn’t run one since accepting his party’s nomination, either, according to a separate comprehensive list of general election ads maintained by the New Republic. The most funded super PACs backing Trump’s candidacy, Make America Number 1 and Great America PAC, don’t have an Obamacare spot on their YouTube pages. (The former, which supported Ted Cruz’s campaign during the primary, is really an anti-Hillary Clinton apparatus, billed at this point as “Defeat Crooked Hillary,” a “special project” of the super PAC.)
The closest Trump’s team has come to promoting an Obamacare-themed video was a debate clip entitled “Obamacare Fail” it uploaded a week ago. It has a little more than 78,000 views as of this writing.
The two-minute video could be categorized as “rare footage”. It comprises most of Trump’s discussion of the law during the two presidential debates thus far. The matter wasn’t even broached during the first forum three weeks ago.
It’s not appeared much on the stump, either, beyond the token “repeal and replace” rhetoric of virtually all Republican campaigns at the national level. Trump joked at one point that former President Clinton “went through hell” for his “craziness” remark. But such a crack is on the periphery of his messaging, and it has few neighbors.
Maybe Trump has spent more time tweeting about the topic, then—Twitter being his most consistent medium for dictating a news cycle. A search from July 21, the final day of the Republican convention, and Monday, however, reveals just nine tweets mentioning “Obamacare” from the handle @realDonaldTrump. (On a related note, he doesn’t have an Obamacare-focused post on Instagram—on which he has posted ads, video clips, and graphics—this year.)
The amount of media coverage including Donald Trump and Obamacare is accordingly scarce. A Lexis Nexis search of English language news stories that contains the two terms somewhere in the headline and lead paragraphs produces about 500 results since July 21. The same search with “Hillary Clinton” in place of Trump results in a similar number. The majority of the articles comprises op-eds or editorials and news that cites the candidates incidentally. The number of stories about Obamacare that can be attributed to Trump’s campaigning is closer to zero than 500—closer to zero than 100, for that matter.
Whether Conway’s assertion that the law ought to “sink” Clinton is debatable. It has faced a referendum in three national elections now, including President Obama’s own run for a second term. But the subject is certainly a heavy piece of luggage for the Democrat; as the Washington Examiner’s Byron York observed, Clinton hasn’t been seen toting it around at all.
That could have been extra incentive for Trump to bring up the issue all along—to do something other than sink himself.
