House Republicans want to repeal health care reform in the worst way, even if it means doing what they slammed President Obama for doing last year: taking their eye off Americans’ economic travails.
They’ve convinced themselves that health reform is a drag on recovery, even though its main provisions won’t kick in for several years. They also claim a popular mandate to undo reform, even though polls show the public evenly divided on the issue.
There is one significant voter block, however, that strongly backs repeal: white voters, and especially white blue collar voters. Health care, unfortunately, is an issue that illuminates a deep racial/ethnic fissure in American politics.
As Ron Brownstein reports in a fascinating National Journal analysis of new exit poll data, 56 percent of white voters back repeal, while an overwhelming majority of minority voters favor either expanding or maintaining Obama’s reforms.
It’s already been widely reported that white voters backed Republican candidates in last year’s midterm 60-37 percent. That’s the lowest percentage Democrats have garnered from white voters since modern polling began. Brownstein’s analysis sheds new light on those voters’ attitudes toward Obama’s policies and government’s role in general. For Democrats and progressives, it’s not a pretty picture:
It’s always a mistake to over interpret the results of a single election, but it’s been a very long time—the post-Watergate election in 1974—since Democrats won an outright majority of the white vote. The defection of blue collar Democrats, the mainstay of the grand old New Deal coalition, also is old news.
Margins matter, of course, and Obama will have to narrow the racial-ethnic chasm to win reelection in 2012, even as he re-energizes his base of minority and young voters, and college women. But electoral calculations aside, the appearance of what Brownstein calls a new “color line” in U.S. politics isn’t good for the nation’s political soul. Progressives need to engage white voters more directly on questions about the size and role of government. We should be serious about making government more accountable, about enabling citizens and communities to do more for themselves, and about reining in runaway federal deficits and debts. But we should also stand firmly for public activism to rebuild America’s productive capacities, particularly our run-down infrastructure, curb out-of-control medical costs and make the promise of equal opportunity real for all citizens.
Obamacare, in fact, is a good place to start that conversation. Progressives ought to be open to refinements and improvements (especially strengthening its cost containment provisions), while remaining resolute in defending the core achievement of extending, at long last, basic health protection to all Americans. After all, blue collar white voters are not natural allies of health insurance companies. They have as much interest as anyone else in having access to affordable care, not losing coverage if they get injured or sick or change jobs, keeping their kids covered through age 26, and in encouraging medical providers to charge based on the quality, rather than quantity of care they deliver.
Progressives should also take the opportunity to remind white voters that Obamacare is no alien import from Canada or Europe, but a national version of Romneycare – the comprehensive coverage approach pioneered in Massachusetts with the full support of that notorious socialist, then-Gov. Mitt Romney.
It’s time, in short, to bring the health care debate down from the level of ideological abstraction – the only level on which conservatives can win – to the concrete realities facing U.S. families struggling with soaring health costs and spotty coverage.
