The most immediate conclusion is that President Obama and the states that chose to expand Medicaid—perhaps inadvertently—found a way to solve the doldrums of mid-term elections that have bedeviled politicians forever. The problem has been most significant for Democrats, who often face significant turnout dropoffs in midterms and as a result have hemorrhaged legislative seats at every level across the country. Unfortunately for them, although turnout increased in 2014, the data suggest no party gained a clear advantage from it.

Democratic leaders probably never intended a turnout bump, but they did embrace the Medicaid expansion much more broadly and earlier than Republican governors and state legislatures—indeed, all of the states that haven’t yet expanded are run by Republicans—and they implemented reforms and rollouts that were much more likely to increase coverage. Haselswerdt’s paper emphasizes this last point: the reduction in midterm dropoff in a district was not related directly to the state’s decision to expand per se, but to its gusto and effectiveness at getting new people signed up.

It might be surprising then that Haselswerdt did not find that the turnout effects of expanding Medicaid were a boon for liberal candidates. In fact, “there’s no evidence that this effect had any benefit for Democrats at all,” he told me. While he found that the liberal-minded reforms from mostly Democratic officials did increase turnout, the partisan share of the vote did not increase for Democrats, and 2014 was a bloodbath for the party. That means that the Medicaid expansion increased Republican turnout at least as much as it did Democratic turnout.

The paper offers up a compelling theory for this effect. Haselswerdt conjectures that the most obvious partisan effect of the Medicaid expansion was not the mobilization of people to protect their newly-gained coverage, but of Republican-leaning voters who were opposed to it. And the opposing increase in turnout came from Medicaid’s “resource effects,” or its downstream effects on things like time, money, transportation opportunities for voter registration, and ability to participate in civics among a low-income population that skewed towards Democrats.

“I am skeptical of the idea that there was self-political mobilization among recipients,” Haselswerdt says. Rather, he believes the data shows that the increase in turnout among new Medicaid beneficiaries was more indirect.

There are a couple pieces of research that complicate these findings. For one, Haselswerdt cites research noting the long depressive effect that Medicaid has seemed to have had on turnout among beneficiaries. While it’s well known that poor people generally have low turnout, especially in midterm elections, research from Teresa Toguchi Swartz and colleagues at the University of Minnesota found that means-tested, “stigmatizing” forms of social assistance like welfare are associated with depressed civic participation, while non-means-tested “non-stigmatizing” forms of assistance are not. While that research does not include Medicaid in the realm of “stigmatizing” aid, Cornell University’s Jamila Michener found that Medicaid was also associated with decreases in participation through the same mechanism of social stigmatization.