You know what’s at stake. Only six wins this fall for Republicans leaves them to rule the Senate. If that happens, House-passed bills outlawing contraception and abortion, promoting guns, and cutting food stamps even for children will be the law of the land. And those 50 votes to defund and rescind Obamacare? Done deal.
That’s why states where Democratic senators seem at risk are drowning in dollars from those who profit if Republicans are in charge. Can you blame the Koch brothers for spending millions through their front group, Americans for Prosperity, on ads to tip these races? They’ll earn back billions if their legislation — like a bill to charge people for using solar panels instead of burning the fossil fuels that are heating our planet but lining the Kochs’ pockets — passes.
North Carolina, where Sen. Kay Hagan (D) is up for re-election, could be drawing the most outside money.
Voters in North Carolina have already been bombarded with 15,000 television political advertisements thanks to the U.S. Senate race…
The cost of those ads is a whopping $6.3 million, and nearly all of them have been paid for by outside groups, according to an analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project.
Many of the ads criticize Hagan’s vote for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a strategy chosen by Republican consultant Karl Rove and the Kochs after the healthcare.gov website’s rocky launch last October. But the overall success of Obamacare’s first enrollment period leaves fewer one-issue voters who will go to the polls just to get rid of the ACA’s supporters.
During confirmation hearings for the nominee for the new head of the Dept. of Health and Human Services, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, Hagan shocked everyone by not just speaking positively about Obamacare, but clarifying how much better off the people of her state would be if the Republican governor took the next step and allowed Medicaid expansion. Most Republican-run states refuse to accept federal dollars to insure more adults and children through Medicaid, forcing the poor to continue to use expensive emergency room services instead.*
Pundits, at first stunned by a Democrat not playing by the GOP rules which dictate that our team should minimize or disavow its support for Obamacare, are realizing the brilliance of Hagan’s move.
Jeffery Toobin deconstructed the strategy for the New Yorker’s Political Scene podcast.
Elections are not necessarily about capturing the swing voters. They are motivating your base, and in North Carolina that means in significant part African-Americans who tend to support Obamacare more than any other group. So it may be that she’s making the political calculation that the people who don’t like Obamacare are not going to vote for me anyway so I might as well double-down and get my vote motivated to go to the polls.
In a midterm election, only very active voters show up. That’s how the House became dominated by Republicans, mostly tea partiers, in 2010. A few of those seats were lost in 2012 because Obama voters returned. This time, Democratic turnout is even more important, but with the economy better off, Obamacare not as much of a hot-button issue, and unemployment shrinking, it’s more likely that Democrats will blow off voting, leaving those rabid tea partiers and far-right Republicans to fill in the ballots.
We hope Democratic senate candidates across the country follow Hagan’s lead and turn out their voters. And we hope it works for Kay Hagan too.
*Which is why at least one Republican-written House bill would make it legal for hospitals to refuse care to uninsured people. This is a ridiculous idea that would never make it through the Senate — unless Republicans take a majority there.
