The past four election cycles, Democrats have been battered and bruised by political attacks over Obamacare.

Now, they say, the time has finally arrived to take the fight to Republicans.


With the GOP in charge of Washington — and charging ahead with their own remake of the health care system — the Democratic Party is convinced that the politics of the ever-potent issue is shifting dramatically in their favor.

House Democrats are angling to make the GOP’s plans to reverse Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion and slash insurance subsidies the defining issue of the 2018 midterms. Some party officials privately say Democrats could ride a backlash over Obamacare repeal all the way to control of the lower chamber — and, in the Senate, stem what are expected to be heavy losses thanks to a Republican-leaning map.

For Democrats, the politics of health care “have flipped," said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

“It was easy [for Republicans) to be critical of Obamacare when you thought it would stay in place. Now that the chance of repeal is real, people are much more worried,” Schumer said in an interview. “We are on offense and united. They are on defense and divided, the opposite of what people would have predicted a month or two ago.”

Obamacare was a major reason that Democrats lose the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014 and the White House in 2016. But since November, the law has become more popular, polling shows, with most recent surveys showing more people approve of it than disapprove.

Ten Senate Democrats are up for reelection in states that President Donald Trump won in 2016; none support repealing Obamacare or trying to work with Republicans on a replacement. House Democrats are similarly united in defense of the law.

After an awkward messaging plan centered around the slogan “Make America Sick Again” fizzled earlier this year, Schumer has led a parade of Democrats to the Senate floor this month to attack “Trumpcare” — a label that President Donald Trump dislikes and that the White House is contesting. It’s a replay of the GOP’s pejorative use of “Obamacare” that took the former president years to embrace.

“It’s sort of indicative that we’re happy to call it Trumpcare and Trump doesn’t want us to,” Schumer said.

The Democratic theory of the case is this: If Republicans try and fail to repeal Obamacare, the Democrats can paint the GOP as both legislatively inept and angling to gut an increasingly popular health insurance law. But if Republicans succeed, they’ll be attacked by the minority party for ramming through massive health care changes on a party-line vote — another reprise of GOP tactics from 2010.

“People now have a greater understanding of what’s at risk of being lost,” said New York Rep. Joe Crowley, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. And if Republicans repeal it, he said, "they own it."

The public, added Rep. John Larson of Connecticut, is having an “epiphany” on what Democrats plan to make their central message in 2018: “If you want a check on Donald Trump, just look at what’s happening with the Affordable Care Act and elect Democrats.”

It's not a given that the GOP's bid to overhaul health care will prove as politically potent for Democrats as it was for Republicans after 2009. Republicans were able to galvanize their voters with constant reminders of what they called a giant leap toward government-run health care; it's unclear that center-left voters would be similarly motivated against the GOP's effort.

There are also noticeable differences in messaging that may have to be reconciled if Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) want to run on a synchronized message.

While Schumer and other Senate Democrats have seized on “Trumpcare,” House Democrats have made a conscious decision to avoid the term, reasoning that Trump's supporters may rally around it, according to a Democratic official.

Instead, Pelosi and her top lieutenants were still using the slogan “make America sick again" earlier this week. But a spokesman for Pelosi on Sunday said House Democrats, too, had decided to stop using the phrase.

Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) said flatly: “That shit doesn’t work.”

“If I were only listening to Nancy Pelosi, all I would be telling you is the Republicans only want to make America sick again. I mean that’s great in San Francisco,” said O’Rourke, who is mulling a bid against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz next year. But “it’s not what I think, it’s not how I speak and it’s not what I’m hearing from my constituents.”

In the Senate, Democrats are defending 25 Senate seats vs. just nine for Republicans. The mandate for Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Chris Van Hollen isn’t necessarily to win the chamber but to keep the Democratic ranks from thinning further.

Internally, Senate Democrats have decided to keep things simple. Instead of highlighting their own solutions, the party is merely going to concentrate on the negative consequences of the GOP’s war on Obamacare.

“Public sentiment is against blowing up the Affordable Care Act,” Van Hollen said. “That’s going to become clearer and clearer.”

Some Republican officials say privately that their efforts to chip away at the Democrats’ 48-member minority might be best led by candidates who have not served in the House and therefore voted to overturn Obamacare. Several prominent House members who could have run in key Senate races in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Indiana have taken a pass on challenging incumbent Democrats who support the existing law.

But GOP lawmakers say they are not going to be deterred by the political risks of capitalizing on their long-held promise. In fact, Republicans say, it would be far more precarious for them to back down.

“It would be really a serious problem,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas, a two-time leader of the party’s Senate campaign committee. “We’ve been running campaigns since 2010 on this, promising to repeal and replace Obamacare. Can you imagine what our supporters would feel like if we didn’t keep our promise?”

The uptick in Obamacare's popularity and GOP's assault on it means the five Democratic senators up for reelection in very conservative states are no longer forced to defend Barack Obama’s unpopular policies. Instead, they're attacking GOP proposals that will make it hard for some of Trump’s lower-income supporters to keep their insurance.

“The threat was always very theoretical. Now it’s very real,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), the party’s 2016 vice presidential nominee who is up for reelection next year. “I have colleagues where Hillary and I lost but they won [in 2012] where it was really tough. But the repeal of the ACA is one of the things that’s working in their favor right now.”

Moderate Democratic senators up for reelection next year agreed.

“I don’t think what [Republicans] are doing is very well thought through,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a top target for the GOP in 2018. “If they had worked with us to fix some of the problems, we would be in such a better place right now. And they would too.”