Four months out from the general election, most pundits and commentators are acting as if Obamacare will have little effect on the results of this year's races. But given Obamacare's extraordinary unpopularity, that's hard to believe. Obamacare is horrible for middle-class Americans: It worsens their job prospects, limits their health-care choices, and raises their premiums, without generally giving them access to its subsidies. That's a toxic political combination.
Even aside from the presidential election, in which Obamacare should provide strong tailwinds for Donald Trump (if he wisely emphasizes the issue) and correspondingly strong headwinds for Hillary Clinton, a couple of swing-state Democratic Senate candidates are trying to prevail despite having personally voted to pass Obamacare over the clear objections of the American people: Michael Bennet, running against retired Air Force officer (and Air Force Academy graduate) Darryl Glenn in Colorado; and Russ Feingold (dumped by voters after his Obamacare vote), who is trying to regain his prior seat against incumbent Ron Johnson in Wisconsin. Indeed, Bennet's and Feingold's votes for Obamacare would seem to represent Glenn's and Johnson's best chances of winning.
Moreover, opposition to Obamacare could prove to be the ace in the hole for vulnerable GOP senators from a number of other states.
Just how unpopular is President Obama's namesake? Well, Real Clear Politics lists 206 polls taken on Obamacare so far during Obama's second term. Obamacare's record in those 206 polls is 3-202-1—that's 3 wins, 202 losses, and 1 tie. In other words, only 2 percent of more than 200 polls during Obama's second term have found Obamacare to be popular, while 98 percent have found it to be unpopular.
Can you imagine if the opposite were true? If 98 percent of polls showed Americans actually liking Obamacare, do you think we might be hearing more from the mainstream press about its level of popularity? If only 2 percent of polls showed Americans opposing Obamacare, do you think we'd be hearing what an electoral boon it is for its supporters?
Nor will the newly released House GOP health-care plan, and the potential reemergence of Paul Ryan as the opposition leader in the Obamacare fight, do any favors for Obamacare's supporters. They can no longer claim it's a choice between Obamacare and the pre-Obamacare status quo. Instead, it's now a choice between a government takeover that's inflating prices and sapping liberty, and a well-conceived alternative that would throw off the yoke of Obamacare and improve everyday Americans' lives in a variety of ways.
Obamacare has already cost Democrats—the party that passed it without a single Republican vote—control of the House and Senate, despite their having held huge majorities in both bodies at the time of Obamacare's passage. The guess here is that the 2,400-page capstone of elite liberal hubris isn't remotely done haunting those who stubbornly hoisted it upon an unwilling citizenry.
In Federalist 63, James Madison wrote that "in all free governments," "the cool and deliberate sense of the community" will "ultimately prevail over the views of their rulers." The remarkable electoral losses by Democrats in the wake of Obamacare's passage, punctuated only by Obama's reelection against the rare sort of Republican who thought "Obamacare was very attractive," provide further evidence of the wisdom of Madison's words. Madison might look even wiser on November 8.