Well, that didn't work out so well for you, huh?
Was the Virginia governor's race really a
referendum on Obamacare? Of course not. Exit polling that showed just 27 percent of people calling Obamacare the number one issue for them proves that the only people (outside the Beltway) obsessed with Obamacare are tea partiers. But could the obsession over Obamcare actually have hurt Cuccinelli? Possibly, Terry McAuliffe’s pollster, Geoff Garin
tells Greg Sargent.
Garin said the campaign specifically polled on Cuccinelli’s bragging point as the first attorney general to target the health law, and that it was a loser for him.
“We tested Cuccinelli’s brag that he was the first attorney general to sue to stop Obamacare,” Garin said. “That actually made more voters less likely to support him than more.”
This will strike commentators as impossible to believe. If a majority in Virginia disapproves of Obamacare, as the exit polls show, surely Cuccinelli’s call for repeal can only be a positive, right? Well, no, not necessarily. And that’s important. It turns on the idea that disapproval of the law does not necessarily translate into support for getting rid of it; that those who disapprove have multiple reasons for doing so; and that some want to give the law a chance to work anyway.
Absolutely, as we've been
chronicling here at
Daily Kos for
months, since at least
July of 2102. A variety of polls, from a variety of pollsters and media outlets, have been arguing for more than a year that the public might not be thrilled with Obamacare, but that they wanted their government to move on, to give the law a chance to work, and to actually maybe do some governing. We got confirmation of that as recently as
last week, when just 24 percent of people in a national poll thought that Obamacare repeal was a good idea.
And here that was played out in a live election, where roughly a quarter of the people said they voted on Obamacare. The 2012 election should have been enough to prove that opposition to Obamacare wasn't going to be a winning issue for Republicans, since the guy whose law it is was pretty handily reelected. But it wasn't, not to Republicans and not to the traditional media which has persisted in giving Republican opposition to the law a hugely disproportionate amount of attention.
Fix it. That's the winning message.