Obamacare won't be the liability for Democrats that it once looked like it would be. Obamacare flips to background noise

A year ago, it looked like Obamacare was going to have a huge role in this year’s elections. And not in a good way — as a symbol of government incompetence and the Republicans’ main case against President Barack Obama’s record.

Now, it’s clear that the health care law is not going to be the centerpiece of the November campaigns, in a good way or a bad way. It’s going to be more like the wallpaper.


Will people notice it? Sure — especially the ones who don’t like wallpaper. Will it make anyone buy a different house, all by itself? Probably not.

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It would be an overstatement to say the Affordable Care Act has disappeared from the fall election campaigns. It hasn’t. Republicans are still running attack ads about it, as are outside conservative groups. Democrats are mostly quiet on the law, but occasionally they’ll speak up — as Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas did — to focus on one of its benefits and promise never to let insurance companies run the show again.

But even Republicans who still believe it’s a significant issue, and a damaging one for Democrats despite its benefits, can’t point to races that are likely to be decided on the health care law alone. That’s a big change from last fall, when it looked like the error-filled rollout and cancelled health insurance plans would make Obamacare a huge liability, and probably a decisive one, for all of the red-state Democrats up for re-election this year.

Now, the health care law is taking a back seat to continuing anxieties about the economy and newer crises, like the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The growing attention to the ISIL threat, in particular, “has certainly taken some of the ‘ouch’ out of Obamacare” for the administration, said GOP ad maker Fred Davis.

The most Republicans can say is that Obamacare will matter, it will work as a symbol of government overreach in some races, and it has already changed the political environment by helping the GOP recruit stronger candidates. Republican pollster Ed Goeas says the health care law “has come to represent overreach of the federal government,” and that is its main value in GOP ads.

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“‘Decisive’ is too strong, but ‘significant’ is not,” said Whit Ayres, another Republican pollster. “It remains a real weight on Democrats from red states who voted for it. And it will continue to be a burden among independents who are about to see their premiums go up.”

Pryor’s team doesn’t think it has to be a burden. His ad maker, Karl Struble, said Pryor’s now-famous ad — in which he talked about how the health care law prevents insurance companies from refusing to cover people with pre-existing conditions — proves that Democrats can talk about the law’s benefits by telling personal stories. Pryor talked about his bout with a rare form of cancer, and how his insurance company didn’t want to pay for an experimental surgery that saved his leg from being amputated.

Struble said that ad was shot about six months ago, and sat unused until the campaign decided the time was right to run it — “after we had gotten past a lot of the hysteria.”

“It has calmed down, because people have [Obamacare coverage] and it is working,” Struble said. “When you look at the individual benefits that people are getting under the law, people’s minds change. And Republicans know this.”

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That enthusiasm hasn’t carried over to the rest of the party. Despite the Pryor ad — and a similar one run by Democratic Senate candidate Natalie Tennant in West Virginia — most Democrats aren’t quite ready to burst out with the pro-Obamacare ad blitzes. But they’re feeling more confident that the health care law is not the issue that’s going to win or lose the November elections for them.

“It’s baked into the cake. Nobody’s changing their minds on it. You’re either penalized or you’re not,” said Democratic pollster John Anzalone.

He’s not alone in that view. Most Republican and Democratic operatives use the same phrase to describe public opinion on the health care law: “baked into the cake.” It has held steady for years, and despite occasional blips — like a surge in disapproval ratings during the bumpy rollout — it has returned to its usual pattern: Most Americans don’t like it, but they don’t want to throw it out.

Even in the battleground states, where the voters are more pro-repeal than in the country as a whole, throwing out the law is not a majority view: A POLITICO poll found that 44 percent of voters in those states want the law to be repealed, with the rest saying they want to keep it with changes or keep it as it is.

That doesn’t mean Republicans have run out of ways to remind voters of the law’s bad times.

( Also on POLITICO: GOP could chip away at Obamacare)

In the Louisiana Senate race, Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy is promoting his legislation, passed by the House last week, that would let insurers continue to sell non-ACA group health insurance plans. He’s using that victory to argue that Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu doesn’t have the clout to push Obama to let people keep their health insurance plans, even though she ran a TV ad about the issue.

Landrieu says the Obama administration’s fix — letting insurers extend people’s pre-ACA individual health plans — was based on her legislation. A Landrieu aide insists that makes her more effective than Cassidy, since Obama won’t sign his bill into law.

The health care law certainly hasn’t disappeared from the airwaves. In recent weeks, Republican Rep. Cory Gardner, running to unseat Democratic Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado, has run a TV ad about the cancelled health plan he says he suffered because of the law. The National Republican Congressional Committee has run independent expenditure ads against Democratic Reps. Ann Kirkpatrick and Ron Barber of Arizona and House candidate Gwen Graham of Florida, citing issues like canceled plans and the law’s Medicare savings.

And outside groups are betting that Obamacare still has some juice. American Crossroads has hit Democratic Sen. Mark Begich of Alaska and several House Democrats for their support of the law, and Americans for Prosperity has targeted vulnerable House Democrats like Joe Garcia of Florida and Nick Rahall of West Virginia.

Republican strategists insist the issue can still help them run up the score on election day. “Obamacare is ‘baked into’ voter’s attitudes and among potential Republican voters, it is one more compelling and convincing reason why to vote Republican,” said GOP pollster Bill McInturff. “Opposition unites the Republican base and draws some center-right Independents to vote Republican.”

Brad Dayspring of the National Republican Senatorial Committee argues that the law still motivates Republican voters more than Democrats. And the National Republican Congressional Committee’s Andrea Bozek says Obamacare is “dragging down Democrat candidates across the country.”

For Democrats, though, the attacks don’t matter enough to decide individual races. Democratic ad maker Steve Murphy says there’s a “cry wolf” syndrome now that the law is in effect, as most people don’t see the massive job losses or sky-high premium increases they were warned about.

“It all matters … I’m not dismissing it,” Anzalone said of the Republican anti-Obamacare ads. “But I just don’t think it does anything but nip at the margins, because everyone’s made up their minds. That’s not what’s going to put them over the edge. It’s going to be something else.”

Democrats have also been able to be more aggressive in pushing for the law’s expansion of Medicaid, and putting Republicans on the defensive in states that haven’t approved it. Landrieu and Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina have hit their opponents for not supporting it, and some Republicans have struggled to deal with the full implications of their anti-Obamacare stances. That’s what happened to Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst, running in a state that expanded Medicaid, when she suggested that she wanted to “protect those that are on Medicaid now.”

Campaigning on the entire law, however, is still rare for Democrats. It’s more common for them to bring it up only in response to a Republican attack, as Graham did after the GOP hit her for supporting the health care law. She fired back with a mixture of defensiveness — she wasn’t in the Senate when the law was passed, it needs to be “changed so it works for North Florida” — and populist attacks on insurance companies.

Republican strategists are aware that the voters aren’t as conscious of the law now that there are no disasters that in the headlines, like there were during the roughest months of the rollout. But that could change in October, they say, if there is a round of premium increases or a possible second wave of cancellations — two fronts that are being watched closely by health care analysts.

A new wave of premium increases in October “could push Obamacare right back to the forefront,” Davis said. McInturff argued that “if more voters lose coverage in October, that negative news environment might continue to raise the saliency of this issue before the election.”

Both scenarios are possible, health care analysts say, but not in a big way. So far, there has been no evidence of massive premium increases for individual Obamacare coverage for next year — the rates that have been announced have either been modest increases or, in some cases, have even gone down slightly.

Some small businesses could face increases as they switch to health coverage under ACA rules, since many were able to extend their pre-ACA plans until now. But analysts say there are few states that haven’t allowed small businesses to extend their plans yet again, so many of those businesses will be able to put off the pain until later — conveniently after the elections.

And yes, there could be another wave of cancellations in states where the extensions allowed by the Obama administration are about to expire. But it’s not likely to be much of a wave. The administration has given the go-ahead for a second round of extensions, but states and insurers have to agree to that — so any cancellations in October would only happen with states and insurers that won’t go along. According to America’s Health Insurance Plans, the main insurer trade group, only 10 states that allowed the first extensions aren’t going along with the second ones.

“There will be some bumps in the road ahead this year with plan cancellations and transition to the ACA for some small businesses, but it will be much less noticeable than the wave of anecdotes that emerged in 2013,” said Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation.