“Obamacare is dead next month if it doesn’t get that money,” Trump told the WSJ. “I haven’t made my viewpoint clear yet. I don’t want people to get hurt. What I think should happen and will happen is the Democrats will start calling me and negotiating.”

And here I'll just quote the exchange between the particulars:

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Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York, the chamber’s Democratic leader, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, have said they are unwilling to discuss a deal with Mr. Trump while the prospect of undermining the law remained on the table. Mr. Trump said Mr. Schumer “should be calling me and begging me to help him save Obamacare, along with Nancy Pelosi.” Responding to Mr. Trump’s comments, Mr. Schumer said the president was “threatening to hold hostage health care for millions of Americans . . . to achieve a political goal of repeal that would take health care away from millions more. This cynical strategy will fail.”

Here is the problem, which can get lost in the strangely resilient genre of stories about Trump's resilient supporters: The president is not popular. Thanks to the 2018 electoral map, he is generally more popular in places that will determine control of Congress than he is in the country at large. (His approval ratings remain above water in at least the four reddest states that are holding 2018 Senate races.)

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But according to all public polling, Trump is less popular than any modern president at this point in his first term. According to Gallup's tracking numbers, the president fell below 40 percent during the Obamacare repeal fight and has recovered to 41 percent. And most voters say they'd blame the party that controls every branch of government, not the Democrats, for problems with the health-care system.

In many presidencies, numbers like those would generate panic. Trump's is not like most presidencies. He won despite a bigger-than-ever community of pollsters and election forecasters saying he would lose, and state pollsters in Michigan and Wisconsin saying he was toast. He proved them wrong. That doesn't just alter his thinking of political influence; it's widely accepted among Trump supporters that the same pollsters who say that Trump is unpopular now were the ones who blew the election.

Where does Kansas come into this? There were no public polls on the race. There were, instead, private polls that only became known in the final days before April 11. And the polls were right.

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Republicans' panic was based on polling and early vote patterns that found Ron Estes, their candidate, fumbling the election away. What I learned in Kansas was that the GOP's numbers in the final week found that registered voters favored Estes by 10 points. Likely voters favored him by five. But based on the voters who actually were turning out, Estes was up by just 1 point.

By the morning of Election Day, after a surge of spending and attention, Republicans believed that Estes would win by five to eight points. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which had its own model of the race, believed by noon that Estes would win by 7 points.

And by the end of the night, the private pollsters had been proved right. Estes had indeed been on track to lose the election, with Democrat James Thompson crushing him in early votes. Election Day turnout pushed him to a 7.2-point win.

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Why does this matter? After 2016, it wasn't just Trump fans who doubted pollsters. Hillary Clinton's campaign made decisions based on turnout models that had her winning the Rust Belt and Florida. Democratic campaign groups were just as sure about their close races. They were shocked by white voters who hadn't turned up in the model but stormed the ballot box to vote for Donald Trump.

But in Kansas, the models basically worked. Republican turnout plunged, despite the late adrenaline boost — Estes won just 38 percent as many votes as the congressman he replaced, Mike Pompeo, won last November. Thompson won 68 percent as many votes as Pompeo's opponent. The voters who crashed the 2016 election were not really inclined to turn out when Trump wasn't running against Clinton.

In Kansas, and in a bunch of other places, that fact won't be enough on its own to save Democrats. But there is a world of difference between wondering whether your opponent has a trick up his sleeve and knowing that you know he can be beaten if you turn out your voters. After Tuesday, Democrats are marginally less worried that a platoon of Trump voters are waiting over the hill, unseen by pollsters, ready to punish them if they don't make a deal with the president.