SALON

Monday, Mar 12, 2012 6:52 PM UTC

Healthcare reform won’t damage Democrats

The effects in the 2010 congressional races won't be repeated this year

By

Topics: 2012 Elections, Healthcare Reform,

Healthcare reform won't damage Democrats (Credit: StockLite via Shutterstock)

How will healthcare reform affect the 2012 presidential election? The topic is back in the news with the publication of a new paper by five political scientists who demonstrate not only that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) had a major effect in 2010, but also how that effect happened: by branding those who supported “ObamaCare” as very liberal.

The Weekly Standard’s Jeffrey Anderson and William Kristol cite that paper to argue that Barack Obama should be doomed – and that Republicans should support Rick Santorum over Mitt Romney because Santorum would be best able to campaign on the issue. Indeed, one would think that the most important, and perhaps most controversial, piece of legislation passed during Barack Obama’s term would have direct, significant effects on his chance for reelection. But that’s almost certainly not the case, and Republicans would be foolish to base their nomination on Anderson and Kristol’s advice.

I’ll start with the difference between 2010 House races, which the team of political scientists studied, and a presidential election. The truth is that those types of elections – midterm House and presidential – have little in common. In both cases, party identification is important. But beyond that, there are quite a few important differences. House elections are typically low-information contests. Most of us barely know who our own Member of the House is, let alone much about him or her. We typically know even less about the challenger. In that kind of context any new information can, it turns out, be fairly potent. As Gary Jacobson has shown, knowing one “good” or “bad” thing about a House candidate (that is, something one believes is good or bad) can have a surprisingly large effect on how one votes. In the case of the healthcare study, it turned out that just knowing that a member voted for ACA was enough to make a significant change in voters’ estimates of how liberal that member was. And why not? It’s not as if people knew of all the other things going on in Washington.

By contrast, presidential elections are heavily funded, high-information contests. That’s particularly true about an incumbent president. Think about it: I bet everyone reading this can reel off a dozen facts about Barack Obama without even trying. You know about healthcare, you know about the stimulus, you know about bin Laden; you know his wife’s name, and his kids, and where he went to high school; you know, probably, about his birth certificate and his old church in Chicago and some of the other attacks that have been made against him. Learning something new about him – say, how he deals with the situation in Syria – probably won’t change what you think of him. In fact, it probably works the other way around; if you already like Obama you’ll assume that what he does in Syria makes sense, and if you don’t like him you’ll be inclined to be critical of what he does there.

Indeed, you probably know quite a bit about Mitt Romney. If you’re a partisan Democrat, you already don’t like him, and if you’re a partisan Republican … well, you may or may not like him now, but after the convention, and after Republican opinion leaders wind up fully supporting him, odds are you will.

Remember, the study found that healthcare hurt Democrats by making people think they were more liberal than they otherwise would have thought. So the question is: To what extent has ACA changed people’s opinions about Barack Obama? My guess is that whatever the answer to that might be, it’s a lot less than the extent to which it changed people’s views of their Member of Congress because it has to compete with so much other information.

At the same time, the Obama campaign apparently believes that healthcare reform could be a plus for him, at least among some key groups – such as women who will have contraception covered under the new law. I’m skeptical about much of an effect there, either, and for the same reason; adding one piece of information is unlikely to change anyone’s mind about Obama. That’s not to say that his campaign shouldn’t try (or that Republicans shouldn’t attempt to pound home their ObamaCare message); after all, if you have raised gazillions of dollars, you might as well use them, and on the margins campaigns certainly can matter, even at the presidential level. It’s just that the overall effect of the entire campaign is relatively small, and so any particular piece of it or a single issue is most likely even smaller. Or, think of it this way: The Republican assault on Planned Parenthood and many of the more aggressive GOP initiatives on abortion have been legislatively separate from the ACA-related birth control wars. The Obama campaign was going to target single women and young women anyway; healthcare reform is just part of the story there.

Moreover, whatever the effects healthcare will have on Barack Obama, it’s almost certainly already incorporated in his overall polling right now; there’s no reason to expect a further change as a result of the fall campaign. I suppose it’s possible that the upcoming Supreme Court ruling could shift public perceptions of ACA somewhat and in turn move Obama’s approval a bit. But I’d expect most changes in Obama’s approval rating, and his overall chances for reelection, to be driven by events from this point on, particularly changes in the economy. There’s really no good argument – and plenty of political science theory against it – to expect healthcare to exert much effect on Obama’s reelection all by itself.

Jonathan Bernstein writes at a Plain Blog About Politics. Follow him at @jbplainblog More Jonathan Bernstein.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 32 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
182 points183 points | 6 comments
vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the persecuted late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
137 points138 points | comment
vote
Obstruction will ruin the GOP: Playing politics and abusing the system can excite the extremes, but it's a recipe for long-term political disaster
46 points47 points | 8 comments
vote
Loaded terminology like "entitlements" and "welfare" skews the debate and alters America. How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government.
30 points31 points | 16 comments
vote
Obstruction Will Ruin GOP - Playing politics & abusing the system can excite the extremes, but it's a recipe for long-term political disaster
15 points16 points | comment

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations