The Biden campaign wants voters who may feel lukewarm on the economy to know they have a choice next year: They can opt for MAGAnomics and lose their health insurance.
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden's 2024 reelection campaign Twitter account, Biden-Harris HQ, tweeted out a brief clip of former Democratic New York state Sen. David Carlucci telling Fox News viewers what a second Donald Trump administration would mean for them.
"Right now, we have the largest number of Americans covered under health insurance," Carlucci said. "Trump wants to repeal the ACA and leave millions of Americans without health insurance. Those are just some of the plain facts about what MAGAnomics means."
The national uninsured rate reached an all-time low of 7.7% in early 2023 after a record-breaking 16 million Americans enrolled in the Affordable Care Act in 2022, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Yet out of nowhere a couple weeks ago, Trump decided to re-up the Republican Party's wildly unpopular and unsuccessful decade-long effort to repeal Obamacare and all the goodies that come with it, including protections for people with preexisting conditions.
Trump has since sought to make his proposal for scrapping the ACA more enticing by promising the best health care ever under a new Trump regime.
“I don’t want to terminate Obamacare, I want to REPLACE IT with MUCH BETTER HEALTHCARE. Obamacare Sucks!!!” Trump posted on his Truth Social site last week.
Oh, and Trump is also going to build the wall, deliver on his infrastructure-y pledges, and hire only "the best" people, as demonstrated by Rudy Giuliani, the deputy he tapped to lead his legal challenge to American democracy, and the crack team at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
Protecting the ACA, informally known as Obamacare, from Republican pledges to end it became a galvanizing issue nationwide in the 2018 midterms, playing a significant role in helping Democrats reclaim the House majority.
Trump's insistence on revisiting the issue gives Democrats another bite at the apple nationwide, but could also specifically boost Biden in a battleground state like North Carolina, where 600,000 residents became insured on Dec. 1 through the ACA's Medicaid expansion.
In interviews this week, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper credited the federal government's $1.8 billion expansion bonus with being an offer that even state Republicans couldn't refuse.
"Let me tell you something," Cooper said on MSNBC, "the signing bonus that the Biden administration gave to states that would expand Medicaid was significant in allowing North Carolina to convince a Republican legislature to give insurance to 600,000 more working North Carolinians."
Cooper also pointed out that Trump won North Carolina by just 1.4 points in 2020—Biden's slimmest loss margin of the cycle.
"So we plan to win North Carolina for Joe Biden in 2024," Cooper said.
By putting newly acquired health coverage on the chopping block for more than half a million Tar Heel state voters, Trump handed Team Biden a prime campaign issue. The Biden campaign clearly knows it, and is working to make sure voters view 2024 as a choice election. In this case, that choice is between having health care (Biden) or being stripped of it (Trump).
Certainly the Biden campaign will be highlighting a series of choices for voters over the course of next year. But for now, North Carolina is ripe for the message that the White House and Cooper spent the week delivering.
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Markos and Kerry give their thoughts on what the country is facing in 2024. The Republican Party is running on losing issues like abortion and repealing the ACA—with no explanation of what they plan on replacing it with. Trump has a lot of criming to atone for, and the Republican platform remains set on destroying democracy.
