Obamacare, once a GOP target, is now a midterm rallying cry for Dems

WASHINGTON» Democrats are centering their campaign to retake Congress and defeat President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick on a staunch defense of the Affordable Care Act, the landmark health-care law that Republicans used to wipe away their majorities in the last two midterm elections.

Democratic candidates and groups are trumpeting support for popular elements of President Barack Obama’s signature law and attacking Republicans for trying to rescind them in last year’s failed repealand-replace effort. Liberal activists are also seeking to convince centrist senators that confirmation of Trump’s new Supreme Court nominee, U.S. Appeals Court Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, would increase the odds that the law known as Obamacare would be dismantled by the courts.

The strategy marks a dramatic turnabout from the previous two midterms when many Democrats avoided defending Obamacare, and illustrates the extent to which the law has taken root as millions of Americans have come to depend on it. Republicans, who relentlessly attacked Democrats for supporting the ACA in 2010 and 2014, are now largely steering their campaigns toward different topics.

“When they were running against Obamacare, they were really just running against Obama. And they were causing people to fear the unknown. And that was effective,” Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said in an interview. “Now, it’s no longer theoretical, rhetorical or even political for most of these folks. They don’t want to be harmed.”

Eight years after Obama signed the sweeping measure, igniting a wave of fury on the right and a duck-andcover strategy on the left, the politics of health care have undergone a stark transformation that is evident in both parties, from the desert towns of Nevada to the Florida seaside.

“In the past, voters had opposition to anything you called Obamacare — it hardly mattered what the explanation was,” said Steven Law, the president of American Crossroads, a conservative group. “I sat in focus groups where you had lower-income independent women who believed doctor office wait times were caused by Obamacare. I don’t think people make that intuitive connection that they did before.”

Democrats on the front lines of the battle for Congress are talking more openly than ever about protecting the health-care law. They frequently contrast their positions with the 2017 GOP push to repeal and replace the ACA, which collapsed in the Senate after three Republicans banded together with Democrats to defeat it.

On Saturday, Rep. Jacky Rosen, the Democratic Senate nominee in the battleground of Nevada, started airing a TV ad attacking Republican Sen. Dean Heller for supporting the repealand-replace plan under pressure from Trump.

In Florida, another pivotal state in the fight for Senate control, a leading Democratic super PAC recently launched an ad featuring an emergency room doctor in scrubs declaring that Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., “took on the insurance companies, forcing them to cover people with preexisting conditions.” The ad does not name Obamacare, but it cites Nelson’s votes for the law and against repeal in small lettering.

In Arkansas’s 2nd District, which Trump won by more than 10 points, Democrat Clarke Tucker released an ad in April citing his battle with cancer and declaring that “health care is a right.” He pledged “to stand up to anyone who tries to take your health insurance.” He is now the nominee against Rep. French Hill, R-Ark., who supported the GOP overhaul.

In two special election wins on conservative terrain in Alabama and Pennsylvania, the Democratic candidates rejected GOP repeal efforts even as they adopted more conservative positions on other issues.

“The American people are tuned in to the failure of the Republicans to come up with an alternative to Obamacare,” said Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill.