No one could quite figure out what replace was, said Adam Brandon, the president of FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy group, as he recalled the partys struggle to repeal the law known as Obamacare after President Trumps election. Thats where the problem was, and we never recovered from it. And we still havent recovered from it today.
Mr. Brandon cited the successful health care message employed by Democrats in 2018, with its emphasis on protecting people with pre-existing medical conditions, and likened it to a football team that calls a running play that proves successful and then keeps calling the same play. If Im the Democrats, he said, I just keep handing the ball off on pre-existing conditions until Republicans prove they can stop that.
Its a playbook that down-ballot Democrats and their allies are using in campaign ads.
Tell Thom Tillis: Stop cutting health care, the narrator says in several recent ads attacking Mr. Tillis, a Republican senator up for re-election in North Carolina. And an ad from Amy McGrath, the Democratic challenger to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, says of her opponent: Even during a pandemic, with people out of work, hes trying to take away health care.
With two months until Election Day, health care is looming as a major weak spot for Republicans, including incumbent senators in close races that could determine which party wins the majority. In a Fox News poll in August, 53 percent of voters disapproved of the way Mr. Trump was handling health care, while Joseph R. Biden Jr. led Mr. Trump by a 15-point margin when voters were asked whom they trusted to do a better job on health care.
The Trump administration is also asking the Supreme Court to overturn the Affordable Care Act, a course of action that offers Democrats a political piñata to swing at in the weeks leading up to Election Day. And that is in addition to the matter of how Mr. Trump has handled the pandemic, a front-and-center issue that is shaping up to be a major liability for Republicans.read more
Health Care Powered Democratic Wins in 2018. The Party Hopes for a Repeat.
