When President Barack Obama made his farewell address Tuesday night in Chicago, he mused about two of his greatest achievements in one of his biggest applause lines.
"If I had told you that we would win marriage equality and secure the right to health insurance for another 20 million of our fellow citizens," he said, "you might have said our sights were set a little too high."
His supporters ate it up. But when it comes to the future of those two great legacies, one stands a much better chance of enduring the incoming administration. Indeed, the Affordable Care Act is now in peril for precisely the same reason that marriage equality stands a solid chance of surviving a GOP assault: public opinion.
The main difference between these two advances and their durability is the fact that while the president and his team shied away from an aggressive campaign to win over the public on health reform, the LGBTQ movement spent decades convincing people that love is love. To be sure, the same-sex marriage debate experienced its own fits and starts, but it was primarily driven by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals themselves at millions of kitchen tables across the country. It was an emergent movement in which regular folks became activists simply by bearing their humanity to their friends, neighbors and relatives.
By the time President Obama endorsed the freedom to marry in 2012 roughly half the nation supported it and today that number sits right around 60 percent. That's probably why the topic tops Gallup’s list of issues on which Americans believe Obama "made progress" during his presidency. Nearly 70 percent of people say things have improved for lesbians and gays on Obama’s watch, while they are evenly split at 43 percent about whether health care improved or lost ground.
As I noted in my book, that shift in public sentiment was mostly caused by instances of people knowing someone who was gay growing significantly over time. In 1994, for instance, a Newsweek poll found that 53 percent of Americans said they knew a lesbian or gay person, but that number had risen to 78 percent by 2008 in the same poll. Those human connections served as the antidote to a long and dirty disinformation campaign waged against the LGBTQ community by social conservatives.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) by comparison got no such boost. The president and his team counted on the notion that once it was enacted and people understood its benefits, they would embrace it. On March 20, 2010, the night before House Democrats voted for final passage, Obama even joked that Republicans were nervous because once he signed the bill into law, "it’s going to be a little harder to mischaracterize what this legislation has been all about."
On one hand, the president was right. Even Trump supporters like a lot of what the ACA has to offer. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll found that 83 percent of Trump voters favor allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance plans, 68 percent like that the law provides financial help for low- to moderate-income families, and 60 percent support its prohibition on insurers denying coverage to patients with preexisting conditions.
But President Obama was wildly off base about how many people would understand the connection between those benefits and the ACA. In fact, an Ipsos poll of more than 1,000 adults released this week found slightly more than half don’t even know that the number of uninsured Americans has decreased since the health law passed. While many Americans in red states don't even realize they are the beneficiaries of "Obamacare," Republicans have also falsely promised voters that they can keep most of the favorable provisions of the law and scrap unpopular features like the coverage mandate.
These misconceptions have been the result of a highly successful GOP misinformation campaign that was never sufficiently combatted by President Obama and the Democratic leadership. In fact, after Democrats took a beating over health reform in 2010 midterms and lost control of the House, they explicitly ran away from it in the 2012 cycle. Even the president himself made only a glancing reference to it at the Democratic convention that year in Charlotte, North Carolina, never once calling it out by name.
In a baffling twist, that has left a law that insures some 20 million Americans and reduced the number of uninsured from 17 to 11 percent at the whim of the GOP congressional majority and Obama's successor, Donald Trump.
Of course, there's no absolute guarantee that marriage equality is here to stay, but thanks to a grassroots effort that won the hearts of millions of Americans, it stands a fighting chance.
As President Obama said from the Rose Garden following the historic 2015 Supreme Court ruling, the achievement was the consequence of "countless small acts of courage" of LGBTQ individuals across the country.
"What a vindication of the belief that ordinary people can do extraordinary things," he said.
That's a lesson we should all take to heart as we head into an era that promises to challenge the resolve of progressive Americans across the country.
Kerry Eleveld is the author of Don't Tell Me to Wait: How the Fight for Gay Rights Changed America and Transformed Obama's Presidency.