Nate Cohn/Upshot:
To the extent Democratic turnout was weak, it was mainly among black voters. Even there, the scale of Democratic weakness has been exaggerated.
Instead, it’s clear that large numbers of white, working-class voters shifted from the Democrats to Mr. Trump. Over all, almost one in four of President Obama’s 2012 white working-class supporters defected from the Democrats in 2016, either supporting Mr. Trump or voting for a third-party candidate…
If turnout played only a modest role in Mr. Trump’s victory, then the big driver of his gains was persuasion: He flipped millions of white working-class Obama supporters to his side.
The voter file data makes it impossible to avoid this conclusion. It’s not just that the electorate looks far too Democratic. In many cases, turnout cannot explain Mrs. Clinton’s losses.
If persuasion is why he won, then persuasion is also how D’s can gain these voters back. It is why I counsel not shaming Trump voters; just shame Trump and his cronies. Highlight how incompetent he is. Remind people he wants to take your healthcare away (it’s true). Acknowledge problems. Offer a better alternative. The rest will follow.
Josh Kraushaar/National Journal:
Dems Could Take House in 2018
GOP majority looks shaky with Trump deeply unpopular, Democrats highly energized, and vulnerable Republicans facing tough votes.
NY Times:
The new Republican government is in deep trouble.
President Trump and his majorities in the House and Senate had hoped to head out for their spring break celebrating the chest-thumping accomplishments of finally gutting President Barack Obama’s health care law and installing a conservative Supreme Court justice. They were determined to show the American public: We got this.
Instead, the health care legislation unraveled in mortifying fashion, leaving Republicans unable to follow through on their central argument for being put in power. They will probably get their Supreme Court justice. But the confirmation of Judge Neil M. Gorsuch is likely to require a partisan maneuver that will inflame the already tense Senate and make it even harder to accomplish anything legislatively on Capitol Hill. And this is before Republicans get to the always formidable jobs of funding the government and raising the debt limit — both tasks they have been loath to take on in the past.
“Right now they look like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategic adviser and former top congressional aide.
The failure of the health care bill exposed inherent Republican weaknesses.
Brookings:
A substantial majority of Americans live outside Trump counties, census shows
According to the estimates, 177 million live in Clinton counties compared to 146 million in Trump counties*. County populations include persons of all ages, not just voters (see Figure 1). While it is true that Clinton took less than one sixth of the nation’s 3,100+ counties, she won most of the largest ones, including 111 of the 137 counties with over 500,000 people. Trump won the Electoral College by successfully navigating rural-urban balances in key swing states, taking small areas by large vote margins.
US News:
Reality Bites
The GOP's health care meltdown quashed three big Republican myths.
- There is unified Republican government in Washington.
- Paul Ryan is a policy genius.
But the biggest Republican fantasy of all is this:
- Americans want government out of health care.
AP:
Business
How AP tallied the cost of North Carolina's bathroom bill
The Associated Press used dozens of interviews and multiple public records requests to determine that North Carolina's "bathroom bill" will cost the state more than $3.76 billion in lost business over a dozen years.
This is how the largest elements were compiled and used
James Hohmann/WaPo:
The Daily 202: New momentum for Medicaid expansion, as more Republicans conclude Obamacare won’t get repealed
THE BIG IDEA: Paul Ryan promised his donors yesterday that he will keep pushing to overhaul the health care system this year, despite his failure last week.But in the 19 states that never expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, the calculus has quickly changed.
Max Boot/FP:
The Russia Scandal Has Reached the Trump Family
And only a special counsel can find out how deep the rot goes.
Jared Kushner, specifically, though Ivanka can’t be far behind.
Brian Beutler/TNR:
Why Republicans Are Ruling With Utter Incompetence
Their dysfunction is the result of years of bad-faith opposition to Obama.
The depiction of Obamacare as a many-tendriled monster strangling human liberty was not the GOP’s instinctive, ideological reaction to the bill, but an outgrowth of a strategic choice the party made to deny Obama any claim to having forged consensus. This decision led to a number of awkward reversals, such as when GOP leaders and right-wing propagandists drove Senator Chuck Grassley from acknowledging a “bipartisan consensus to have individual mandates” to validating death-panel conspiracy theories in a matter of weeks.
The upshots of adopting such an absolutist facade can be strung together into a fateful parable of sunk costs. Seven years later, it is still impossible for Republicans to admit that, contrary to their initial portrayal, Obamacare is simply what a market-oriented national health insurance system looks like. By closing off the one avenue by which transactional Republicans might forge a health care detente, people like Paul Ryan guaranteed the entire party an eventual reckoning with the basic idea that every American deserves affordable medical care.
Rather than make the unpopular counterargument, and oppose the Affordable Care Act on the basis of ideological differences, Republicans adopted an unprincipled strategy of attacking and promising to remedy the law’s every weakness—even when their promises cut against conservative orthodoxy.
Andrew Sprung/NY Times:
The Democrats’ Next Move on Health Care
Staring into the abyss of Republican intentions that produced this bill, a Democrat might daydream: What if there were a Republican bill that did not repeal the A.C.A.’s revenue sources, did not repeal the Medicaid expansion and left states free to maintain the current marketplace structure?
In fact, there is such a bill. It was introduced in January by four Republican senators: Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Johnny Isakson of Georgia. It’s called the Patient Freedom Act (known informally as Cassidy-Collins), and it was almost entirely ignored by Republican leadership.
It would need considerable tweaking but at least it accepts the existence of ACA.
NY Times:
2018 Dilemma for Republicans: Which Way Now on Obamacare?
As they come to terms with their humiliating failure to undo the Affordable Care Act, Republicans eyeing next year’s congressional campaign are grappling with a new dilemma: Do they risk depressing their conservative base by abandoning the repeal effort or anger a broader set of voters by reviving a deeply unpopular bill even closer to the midterm elections?
The question is particularly acute in the House, where the Republican majority could be at risk in 2018 if the party’s voters are demoralized, and Democratic activists, energized by the chance to send a message to President Trump, stream to the polls.
Sifting through the wreckage of a disastrous week, Republican strategists and elected officials were divided over the best way forward. Some House Republicans pressed to move on to other issues and notch some victories that could delight their own loyalists while not turning off swing voters.