President Barack Obama summed up the left’s current Obamacare talking points in a Rose Garden speech last week: “The Affordable Care Act is a law that passed the House, that passed the Senate, the Supreme Court ruled constitutional. It was a central issue in last year’s election. It is settled, and it is here to stay.”
In other words, “I won. Obamacare won. Get over it.” Yeah right.
Make no mistake, had the 2012 national ballot bluntly asked Americans whether they support or oppose Obamacare, President Obama might have still won the election, but the ironically named Affordable Care Act would have gone down in flames. The 2012 election was decidedly not a vote of confidence for President Obama’s signature legislative achievement.
Exhibit one: Polls clearly show America is deeply divided over the law.
In its 2012 exit polling, The Washington Post found that about half of Americans wanted Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The RealClearPolitics average of all Obamacare polling shows that about half of Americans oppose it while about four in ten support it. In fact, just about every poll ever performed on Obamacare, both before and after 2012, illustrates that a consistent majority of Americans oppose the law.
This overwhelming opposition to Obamacare is probably the reason why 2010 Democratic candidates spent roughly three times more on advertisements deriding Obamacare than on ads in support of the law.
Exhibit two: Former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) and other candidates avoided Obamacare as a national campaign issue.
For a variety of reasons, including the awkward fact that he had previously defended a similar healthcare law while governor of Massachusetts, Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney intentionally declined to make Obamacare a central issue of his campaign.
Back in August 2012, The Huffington Post actually noted the near silence on Obamacare in national swing-state advertising and campaign speeches by both candidates, concluding that “[The 2012 election] will be a referendum on many things, but Obamacare is not one of them.”
The real issues in 2012, according to most pundits and politicians, were Romney’s tax returns and the imagined GOP “War on Women.”
Of course, when Obamacare was actually the central issue of a national election, Republicans ended up winning a historic 63 House seats and six Senate seats. A post-election study of 2010 revealed that Obamacare votes cost Democrats about six percent at the polls nationally. President Obama’s margin of victory in 2012 was about four percent.
Exhibit three: Obamacare implementation was intentionally scheduled to avoid election-year problems.
In keeping with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s now infamous remark that “we have to pass [Obamacare] so that you can find out what is in it,” many of Obamacare’s most unpopular aspects were intentionally delayed until after the 2012 election in order to avoid election-year scrutiny from the media and public.
For example, 10 of Obamacare’s 18 tax hikes were scheduled to be implemented after 2012, including the deeply unpopular individual health insurance mandate. One recent poll found that only 12 percent of Americans support implementing the individual mandate in 2014.
Campaigning exclusively on the law’s more popular provisions, such as requiring coverage for preexisting conditions and permitting adult children to stay on their parent’s health plans until they are 26 — both of which could have been instituted without a sweeping healthcare overhaul — isn’t really the same thing as “campaigning on Obamacare.”
