There’s little doubt the fiscal fights have helped Democratic prospects. Battle lines for 2014 are drawn

The 2014 midterm just got a lot more interesting.

The twin dramas of the government shutdown and botched rollout of Obamacare have snapped a sleepy 2014 election season out of its slumber, sharpening the battle lines for each party and setting the stage for a consequential midterm that few expected even two months ago.


The spring and summer months were filled with charges and countercharges about the Internal Revenue Service, wiretapping, Syria and immigration. Politicians recycled old attack lines and operatives confidently predicted control of Congress would remain status quo after next November.

No more. The parties’ competing political narratives — the dangers of a tea party-controlled party versus the perils of President Barack Obama’s far-reaching health care law — have been thrown into sharp relief the past several weeks. Now each party has something tangible to point to — that touch voters’ lives in concrete ways — to argue that the other should be booted from office.

( PHOTOS: Senators up for election in 2014)

Republican lawmakers who seemed safe are suddenly looking over their shoulders, and Democrats whose election hopes were buoyed by the shutdown have been brought back to earth by the Obamacare mess.

Democrats still intend to run against what they call Republican extremism, as they did in 2012. But Republicans’ willingness to shut down the government and bring the nation to the cusp of default, they say, has shown the public what the tea party’s agenda means in real life — government workers paid to sit home for weeks, shuttered national parks, 401(k) accounts at risk.

It’s a similar story with Republicans and Obamacare.

The GOP still plans to make Obamacare a centerpiece of its midterm strategy — tying Democratic candidates in close Senate and House races to the sweeping law — as it did in 2012. But the glitch-riddled unveiling of the Obamacare website, they say, has handed them a powerful piece of evidence to make the case that the federal government should never have thrown itself into the health care business in the first place. And they expect the next year to bring more stories of the law sticking people and businesses with bigger health care bills.

( Also on POLITICO: Right flanks join to push conservative goals)

“That’s going to be the battleground,” said Wes Anderson, a Republican pollster. “Which message is going to be the most salient to voters in the middle? Is it that Republicans are too extreme or that we need to protect the public on Obamacare?”

Democrats believe their anti-tea party message will resonate throughout the country, in every state and congressional district. With the tea party’s brand deep in decline, they argue that post-shutdown anger extends to even the most conservative corners of the country.

Kelly Ward, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an interview that the focus on the tea party’s agenda would work “everywhere,” including in districts in Arkansas, where House Democrats are trying to snatch two seats from Republicans.

“I think the message is the same,” she said. “This is all about the economy, and how their agenda is impacting people’s lives.”

( PODCAST: Questioning Obamacare glitches - who knew what, when?)

There’s little doubt the fiscal fights have helped Democratic prospects, especially in the battle for the House, where the party faces an uphill push to erase the GOP’s 17-seat majority. After the 16-day shutdown came to an end, the Cook Political Report upgraded Democratic prospects in 14 House races. Whether that momentum dissipates over the next year is an open question.

But with deadlines early next year to fund the government and to raise the debt ceiling, Democrats say another showdown — or even talk of one from Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and his conservative allies — would reignite anger at Republicans and give another boost to their 2014 hopes.

“I think what’s happened in the last month is obviously pretty important in the battle for control of the House,” said Ali Lapp, executive director of the House Majority PAC, a group that boosts House Democrats. “This is the gift that keeps on giving for Democrats.”

Democrats plan to affix the tea party shutdown label even to moderate Republicans who are at odds with that wing of the party. Republican Carl DeMaio, a former San Diego city councilman, is being called too conservative for the urban congressional district he’s running in.

In one recent press release, the DCCC connected him to Cruz. “Senator Cruz has been the leader of the reckless push to shut down the government, and Carl DeMaio will be a loyal foot soldier pushing these irresponsible crises — that’s not the kind of leadership San Diego wants.”

DeMaio shrugged off the attacks, pointing to his moderate record and saying he disagreed with the Republicans who pressed to defund Obamacare even at the cost of closing the government.

“People are disgusted by both parties and the extremism and the political games that are seen in both parties,” he said in an interview. “My opponent is taking a page out of the national playbook — ‘call them extremists’ — and it doesn’t fit.”

“Frankly, I’m eager to take on the Republican Party nationally,” DeMaio added. “The shutdown has only energized me even more to take on the broken system.”

Illinois Republican Darlene Senger, a state representative who’s running for a Democratic-leaning congressional seat in the Chicago suburbs, said she would point to her experience working across the aisle to fend off attempts to caricature her as a conservative.

“It’s a way to say that if you want to stereotype me as a tea party extremist, voters will see that it’s not the case,” she said.

Midterm elections, to one degree or another, are referendums on the commander in chief. That’s likely to be true again in 2014, with Republicans seizing on the bumpy Obamacare introduction to revisit the anti-health care argument they’ve used for the past four years. With much of the 2014 battleground encompassing conservative parts of the country where distrust of Obamacare remains high, taking aim at the law, Republicans say, is only fitting.

All of the momentum is for this “midterm [to be] about Obamacare,” said Brock McCleary, a Republican pollster. “Obamacare is still a net negative for Democrats, and it’s not going to get better for them.”

McCleary said his party would eventually try to broaden its message, making the case that Obama’s policies are hurting the American people and slowing the recovery of the nation’s sputtering economic recovery.

Liesl Hickey, executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said the Obamacare snafus played into an argument Republicans made during the last midterm election and would try to replicate again in 2014: that Obama needs a check on his power.

“Americans have experienced what happens when Democrats go unchecked in Washington,” she wrote in an email. “From the IRS scandal to wasteful spending to the disastrous Obamacare rollout, we consistently see in polling that voters in swing districts are distrustful of the Democrats ability to provide the accountability and transparency in government they were promised under this administration.”

How successful Republicans are in relitigating the Obamacare debate, GOP strategists say, will hinge in part on how long the problems with the rollout persist and on how voters feel the new law is affecting their lives.

Democrats say they’re prepared to own Obamacare, arguing that voters are more interested in improving the law than more political fights over it. Democrats running in conservative areas — where the anti-Obamacare GOP offensives will be the most intense — are pushing proposals to improve, or at least soften the blow of the law. One example: a group of Democrats running for Senate in red states, including North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagen and Michelle Nunn, who is running for a Georgia seat, have called for a delay in the law’s enrollment period.

Other Democratic candidates are going even further to distance themselves.

“I wasn’t here to vote on Obamacare,” James Lee Witt, who is mulling over a congressional bid in Arkansas, said in an interview.

“All these years, I’ve worked with Republicans and Democrats,” he added. “If I win, I’ll be working with both parties.”