U.S. President Barack Obama signs the Affordable Health Care for America Act during a ceremony with fellow Democrats in the East Room of the White House March 23, 2010 in Washington, DC.
Win McNamee | Getty Images
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi lost her gavel and regained it in this decade. Obamacare played a major role each time.
In 2010, a voter rebellion against the health-care law helped Republicans wallop Democrats and gain House control. Eight years later, Democrats made GOP efforts to scrap Obamacare the centerpiece of their campaigns and then won back the chamber.
"I'll just tell you that the lesson from all of this is that health-care policy is treacherous politics," said Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican congressman. He won Florida's swing 26th District in 2014 after a campaign in which he promised to repeal Obamacare, then lost his seat to Democratic Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell in 2018 following a vote to scrap the law.
In the nearly 10 years since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became law in March 2010, it has gone from political anchor to tailwind for Democrats. President Barack Obama's signature legislative achievement became one of the defining issues of the decade and shaped recent elections more than just about any other policy issue.
"Backlash to the ruling party's actions on health care were a significant part of both the 2010 and 2018 waves," said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of election forecasting site Sabato's Crystal Ball. He added that resistance to the law also probably helped the GOP in the 2014 midterms, especially after a messy rollout of the insurance exchange website in 2013.
Obamacare sentiment reflects broader trends in American political opinion, Kondik said. Voters often buck the party in power, so the Affordable Care Act was less popular under Obama but gained traction once President Donald Trump took office. Both Democrats and independents started to feel better about Obamacare after Trump entered the White House, driving the increase in popularity, according to monthly Kaiser Family Foundation tracking polls.
Democratic calls to maintain the law particularly its provisions protecting Americans with preexisting medical conditions appeared to resonate with voters when Republicans got a real chance to replace the health system.
"Health care was on the ballot, and health care won," Pelosi told reporters in November 2018 after Democrats flipped House control.
The landmark law better known as Obamacare offered new subsidies for buying plans, barred insurers from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions, allowed states to expand the joint federal and state Medicaid program for low-income Americans and let children stay on their parents' plans until age 26, among other provisions. Last year, 8.5% of the U.S. population was uninsured, down from 13.3% in 2013, before Obamacare fully took effect.
Before the shift, the Affordable Care Act appeared to hurt Democrats politically at the outset as Republicans billed it as a government takeover of health care.
While a plurality of voters approved of the law a month after its passage, sentiment changed before the 2010 midterm elections, according to Kaiser surveys. In October 2010, 44% had an unfavorable view of the law, while 42% saw it favorably.
In the 2010 elections, Democrats lost 63 House seats. Republicans flipped the chamber and kept control until this year. The GOP also gained six Senate seats.
The incumbent president's party almost always loses seats in midterm elections. Even so, Obamacare appeared to propel the Democratic drubbing.
Nearly half or 45% of voters said their 2010 vote was a message of opposition to Obamacare, according to exit polling cited by NBC News in 2014. Only 28% responded that their vote was a message of support for the law.
After Republicans took over the House in 2011, then the Senate in 2015, they tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act dozens of times. The party made opposition to the law a central part of its political messaging for years though Obamacare remained safe as long as its namesake president sat in the Oval Office.
The GOP gained another 13 House and nine Senate seats in the 2014 midterms. Following the election, then-House Speaker John Boehner said resistance to the health-care law drove the results.
"The American people have made it clear: They're not for Obamacare. Ask all those Democrats who lost their elections Tuesday night. A lot of them voted for Obamacare," he said in November 2014.
Exit surveys cited by NBC News suggest the health-care law had a smaller effect in 2014 than it did in 2010. Only 28% of voters said they wanted to express opposition to Obamacare, while 12 percent said they aimed to show support for the law.
When Trump won the White House and the GOP held control of Congress in 2016, Republicans finally got their chance to dismantle Obamacare. While the House passed a repeal bill in 2017, the Senate never could. The GOP fell one vote short in a dramatic late-night vote on a bill to roll back major parts of the ACA.
The Trump administration has managed to dismantle pieces of Obamacare, both through administrative and legislative action. The GOP tax law passed in 2017 to end the individual mandate, a divisive provision that required most Americans to have health insurance or pay a penalty.
Public opinion around the law started to shift after Republicans gained control of the White House and Congress and started to propose their own alternatives to Obamacare. For nearly all of the stretch from February 2013 to February 2017, monthly Kaiser polls found a larger share of adults had a favorable view of the law than unfavorable.
But in every month since May 2017, Kaiser has found more adults like the ACA than dislike it. In November, 52% of adults surveyed by Kaiser had a favorable view of Obamacare, versus 41% who had an unfavorable opinion.
Curbelo said opposition to Trump, and his most prominent policy push in trying to unravel Obamacare, helped to drive a rough 2018 election for the GOP.
"A large part of the debacle that was that election, certainly in the House, can be attributed to health care," he said.
The former congressman said he does not regret his vote to pass the American Health Care Act, the House Republican ACA overhaul, even now knowing he lost his seat. Curbelo said the vote "was about keeping [his] word" to repeal and replace Obamacare, which he had promised to do since he first ran for Congress.
At the same time, the top Democrats running for the party's presidential nomination all support Obamacare. They only disagree on how best to improve the system.
Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., want a "Medicare for All" system to move quickly to insure every American. Former Vice President Joe Biden and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg want Americans to have the option to buy into public insurance while keeping the private system.
"There is a significant segment on the left who appears to believe the ACA was insufficient, and even the candidates who are more moderate on health care, like Biden and Buttigieg, who want to do more on health care than the ACA did," Kondik said. "So at the very least, there seems to be some broad consensus that a future Democratic president/congressional majority should build on the ACA."
As the popularity of Obamacare and the former president himself have grown, Democrats have become more comfortable tying themselves to the ACA and Obama. In a presidential debate in September, Biden pointed to the fact that Warren said she was with Sanders on health care.
"Well I'm for Barack. I think Obamacare worked," he said.
In releasing his health plan in July, Biden also defended the law passed when he was vice president.
"I understand the appeal of Medicare for All," he said. "But folks supporting it should be clear that it means getting rid of Obamacare, and I'm not for that."
Graphics by CNBC's Nate Rattner
Subscribe to CNBC on YouTube.
Read the original:
A decade of Obamacare: How health care went from wrecking to boosting Democrats - CNBC
- Sen. Chris Murphy urges Democrats to follow Tom Suozzi and go on the offensive on the border - NBC News - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- New Mexico's Democrat-led House rejects proposal for paid family and medical leave - The Seattle Times - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- Democrats see 2024 blueprint in N.Y. election that centered on immigration - The Washington Post - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- Democrats cheer New York win as good omen for November. But is it enough to calm anxiety over Biden? - The Associated Press - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- Leaning Into Migrant Woes, Suozzi Paves Election-Year Path for Democrats - The New York Times - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- New York Special Election Live Results: Tom Suozzi Wins George Santos's Seat - The New York Times - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- Democrats win another special election, and 4 more takeaways from New York's House race - ABC News - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- NY Special Election Winner Tom Suozzi to Fill Santos Seat - Bloomberg - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- Democrat Suozzi wins special election to replace Santos in New York - NPR - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- New House lines in New York would boost 2 Democrats and a Republican - POLITICO - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- Democrats win back George Santos seat in hotly contested election - POLITICO - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- Democrats and Republicans hold Black History Month celebrations with an eye on November's election - The Associated Press - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- NY-03 Special: Four Takeaways from Suozzi and Democrats' Decisive Win - The Cook Political Report - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- New York special election results: The Democrats flipped George Santos' old seat. But here's the real story. - Slate - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- West Virginia bill defining gender is transphobic and 'political rubbish,' Democrats say - The Associated Press - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- Biden isn't leaving the 2024 race, but how would Democrats pick a nominee if he did? - ABC News - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- Proposed TikTok ban dies in Virginias Democratic-controlled House - The Hill - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- Opinion | Tom Suozzi Makes the Democrats Look Good for a New York Minute - The New York Times - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- Tom Suozzi buoyed by higher Democratic turnout, decline in GOP voting - Newsday - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- We asked young Black voters about Biden and the Democrats. Here's what we learned - NPR - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- New York Special Election: Tom Suozzi Wins House Seat Vacated by George Santos - The New York Times - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- Democrat Tom Suozzi to replace republican George Santos in U.S. House of Representatives - 13newsnow.com WVEC - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- Who is Tom Suozzi, Democrat in New York's special election - The Washington Post - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- Democrat Tom Suozzi wins special election to fill George Santos's House seat. Here's why it matters beyond New York. - Yahoo News - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- Democrat Wins Special Election for George Santos' House Seat Mother Jones - Mother Jones - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- Not an Ordinary Special Election, and Yet a Typical Result - The New York Times - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- Trump slams Democrat Nikki Haley on home turf ahead of South Carolina primary: Shes finished - Washington Examiner - February 14th, 2024 [February 14th, 2024]
- Senate Democrat calls GOP hostage-taking in debt ceiling deal making dangerous: This cannot be the norm - The Hill - May 30th, 2023 [May 30th, 2023]
- Scoop: Dems told to say debt ceiling bill rejects GOP's "extreme demands" - Axios - May 30th, 2023 [May 30th, 2023]
- Debt Ceiling Is First Big Test for Hakeem Jeffries, the Top House Democrat - The New York Times - May 30th, 2023 [May 30th, 2023]
- Does the debt deal have enough GOP support? This Democratic senator says he's worried. - POLITICO - May 30th, 2023 [May 30th, 2023]
- Delbert the Democrat and his friends in the liberal media - leader-call.com - May 30th, 2023 [May 30th, 2023]
- Why I believe RFK Jr. will be the 2024 Democratic nominee - The Hill - May 30th, 2023 [May 30th, 2023]
- Republican blitz on LGBTQ issues exposes fractures among Texas ... - The Texas Tribune - May 30th, 2023 [May 30th, 2023]
- Texas Passes Bills Targeting Elections in Democratic Stronghold - The New York Times - May 30th, 2023 [May 30th, 2023]
- The Rise of Religious 'Nones' Won't Save Democrats - New York Magazine - May 30th, 2023 [May 30th, 2023]
- Democrats trade insults over bill at committee meeting - Spectrum News NY1 - May 30th, 2023 [May 30th, 2023]
- Kentucky Democrat Who Lost Bid to Unseat McConnell Fined $10K ... - Heritage.org - May 30th, 2023 [May 30th, 2023]
- Mississippi Democrats improperly excluded candidate for governor ... - The Associated Press - May 30th, 2023 [May 30th, 2023]
- Asian voters in the U.S. tend to be Democratic, but Vietnamese ... - Pew Research Center - May 30th, 2023 [May 30th, 2023]
- Gilbert, Mesa lawmakers unimpressed with Democrat's reason for ... - Daily Independent - May 30th, 2023 [May 30th, 2023]
- Former Republican and Democratic Governors from Alabama ... - Death Penalty Information Center - May 30th, 2023 [May 30th, 2023]
- 3 Tennessee Democrats face removal from office in Thursday vote after gun control protest on state House floor - CNN - April 6th, 2023 [April 6th, 2023]
- Democrat or Republican: The Official Differences | Merriam-Webster - March 31st, 2023 [March 31st, 2023]
- Truck driver who upset top N.J. Democrat in 2021 faces GOP primary challenge in big election year - NJ.com - March 31st, 2023 [March 31st, 2023]
- A top Democrats radical plan to deal with Trumps worst judge and protect abortion rights - Vox.com - February 20th, 2023 [February 20th, 2023]
- About the Democratic Party - Democrats - February 7th, 2023 [February 7th, 2023]
- Democratic Party (United States) - Simple English Wikipedia, the free ... - February 2nd, 2023 [February 2nd, 2023]
- Democrat NYC Mayor Adams calls on federal government to play more proactive role to secure border - Fox News - January 17th, 2023 [January 17th, 2023]
- Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin announces he has 'serious but curable form of cancer' - CNN - December 28th, 2022 [December 28th, 2022]
- Sen. Sinema's switch to Independent will not impact Democrats' control of the chamber, representatives say - CNBC - December 12th, 2022 [December 12th, 2022]
- 'People are fed up': As NC Democrats reflect on election missteps, a party shake-up is underway - WRAL News - December 12th, 2022 [December 12th, 2022]
- What is a Democrat? (with pictures) - Historical Index - November 23rd, 2022 [November 23rd, 2022]
- This is the late message some Democrats believe could make a difference in close elections - CNN - November 1st, 2022 [November 1st, 2022]
- Dylan Roberts in his words: The Democrat running for a seat in Senate District 8 promises to focus on living affordability, the environment and rural... - October 25th, 2022 [October 25th, 2022]
- POLITICO Playbook: Where Democrats can find some good news - POLITICO - POLITICO - October 21st, 2022 [October 21st, 2022]
- Kill the babies to curb inflation? Democrats are the real abortion extremists - Washington Examiner - October 21st, 2022 [October 21st, 2022]
- The vote to subpoena Trump shows Democrats have found their fighting spirit - The Guardian US - October 15th, 2022 [October 15th, 2022]
- Cameron Smith: Is the worst Republican better than the best Democrat? - AL.com - October 15th, 2022 [October 15th, 2022]
- Inflation report is bad news for Democrats - The Hill - October 15th, 2022 [October 15th, 2022]
- Democrats try to break through on drug pricing message - The Hill - October 15th, 2022 [October 15th, 2022]
- Meet the Black Republican whos aiming to flip a Democratic held House seat in heavily blue Connecticut - Yahoo News - October 15th, 2022 [October 15th, 2022]
- Democrats Worry They're Being Overshadowed in Arizona's Governor Race - Yahoo News - October 15th, 2022 [October 15th, 2022]
- Democrats suggest shifting weapons from Saudi Arabia to Ukraine - The Guardian US - October 15th, 2022 [October 15th, 2022]
- WATCH: Voters react to Nancy Pelosi claiming Democrats will win midterm elections without Trump on the ballot - Fox News - October 15th, 2022 [October 15th, 2022]
- Former presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard says she is leaving the Democratic Party - NPR - October 13th, 2022 [October 13th, 2022]
- Oregon could elect a non-Democrat governor for the first time in 40 years - Statesman Journal - October 13th, 2022 [October 13th, 2022]
- 'The Great Realignment': Democrats Leave Party in Droves, and What It Could Mean for GOP in November - CBN.com - October 13th, 2022 [October 13th, 2022]
- Texas Democrat uses edited photo of GOP opponent in campaign ad that makes her appear more aggressive - Washington Examiner - October 13th, 2022 [October 13th, 2022]
- This Democrat Living On Nearly $400,000 Is Frustrated By Inflation - Washington Free Beacon - October 13th, 2022 [October 13th, 2022]
- Why Kansass Democratic Governor Isnt Talking About Abortion But Her GOP Opponent Is - FiveThirtyEight - October 13th, 2022 [October 13th, 2022]
- Can Democrats Win 52 Senate Seats And Kill The Filibuster? - FiveThirtyEight - October 13th, 2022 [October 13th, 2022]
- Ricky Jones: Black men are not the problem for Stacey Abrams and Democrats - Courier Journal - October 13th, 2022 [October 13th, 2022]
- How Democrats are trying to counter a wave of GOP attacks on crime - POLITICO - September 20th, 2022 [September 20th, 2022]
- Why Democrats' midterm optimism could be misguided - The Hill - September 20th, 2022 [September 20th, 2022]
- Will The Polls Overestimate Democrats Again? - FiveThirtyEight - September 20th, 2022 [September 20th, 2022]
- Lauren Boebert's Democratic opponent forgot he was previously registered as a Democrat - Washington Examiner - September 20th, 2022 [September 20th, 2022]
- Democrats' No. 1 fall goal: Try not to 'poke the bear' - POLITICO - September 20th, 2022 [September 20th, 2022]
- Is This When Democrats Finally Learn How to Message? - The New Republic - September 20th, 2022 [September 20th, 2022]
- Meet the Democrat on a Six-Figure Income Who Cant Afford To Buy Her Kids Shoes - Washington Free Beacon - September 20th, 2022 [September 20th, 2022]