The Democrats last night narrowly lost the special election for the Florida congressional seat held for years by the late Republican Bill Young, and the pundits’ verdict is clear: it's Obamacare that done it. From Politico:

Jolly’s win shows just how politically treacherous the path is for Democrats running in such moderate-to-conservative areas. Rather than moving to the center, Jolly pushed to the right, painting himself as a foe of President Barack Obama and his Affordable Care Act—and presenting Sink as a staunch ally. “She supports Obamacare. I don’t. I’m David Jolly, and I approve this message because [we] need someone to look out for our interests, not President Obama’s,” he said in one TV ad. In the face of those kinds of attacks, Sink’s can’t-we-all-just-get-along message just didn’t cut it. Following Sink’s loss, some Democrats said they’re rethinking their approach to combating the GOP’s Obamacare-centered assault. Sink’s nuanced “fix it, don’t repeal it” message was one that the national Democratic Party is urging many candidates to embrace, but it may have been drowned out by the avalanche of loud Republican attacks. One Democratic operative predicted that candidates would now find it safer to flat-out state their opposition to Obamacare, saying that, “It’s gonna be tough to get Democrats to support the Affordable Care Act this cycle now with the standard ‘fix the good, get rid of the bad’ schtick.’”

By this logic, Democratic candidates in 2014 should be running as fast as they can from Obamacare. This strikes me as entirely wrong. What Democrats need this year is more Obamacare, not less.

Let me explain. For starters, Democratic pollsters who surveyed the Florida district, number 13, on the Gulf Coast around St. Petersburg, say that the Affordable Care Act was not a drag on Democratic candidate Alex Sink, that in fact survey respondents said they trusted Sink more than Republican David Jolly to handle Obamacare.* Sink’s candidacy had other problems—her image as an outsider who’d moved to the district just to run to the race, her generally over-cautious and un-dynamic manner, President Obama’s low approval ratings amid a slow economic recovery and, yes, the quadrennial Democratic problem of getting voters to turn out for non-presidential elections. As NBC’s First Read reports: “Turnout last night was 183,634. However, in the 2012 general election—when Obama narrowly carried the district—turnout was nearly double at 329,347. And even in the 2010 election, turnout in that district was 266,934.”

So how to get more Democratic voters out? Well, this is where the more Obamacare comes in. To the extent that the new law has not created a groundswell of enthusiasm for Democratic candidates among the law’s intended beneficiaries it is surely in part because…so many of the law’s intended beneficiaries are not being helped by the law. Fully one half of the expansion of health coverage under the law was supposed to occur through the expansion of Medicaid, to cover all people under 138 percent of the poverty line. And in Florida and nearly two dozen other states, that expansion is not happening, thanks to the Supreme Court ruling that made the expansion optional and the opposition of Republican governors and state legislators.

In Florida alone, there are more than 1 million people who were supposed to be covered by the Medicaid expansion but are still uninsured. In Pinellas County, the heart of the 13th Congressional District, there are more than 50,000 people in that coverage gap (the district as a whole had more than 134,000 uninsured in 2011, slightly below average for Florida's very high rate of uninsured). Yet this basic reality is constantly overlooked in coverage of the law—pundits note that the law is not polling all that well even among the uninsured, as if this some kind of ironic commentary on the law’s failure. No, it’s a commentary on the fact that millions of the uninsured aren’t benefiting from the law, because of the blockage of the Medicaid expansion. Why should they tell pollsters they support it? It’s not doing anything for them.