Obamacare and the House: In the Same Boat, Sink or Swim

Two days have passed since the deadline for the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate. March 31 was the last day you were allowed to not have health insurance without paying an extra tax. So, in true American fashion, hundreds of thousands of uninsured Americans put off their chores until the last day, then scrambled to connect to HealthCare.gov and flooded the already overloaded call centers.

The numbers came in yesterday: new insurance sign-ups had reached the magic 7 million number that was the benchmark for success by the Department of Health and Human Services back when they were rolling out HealthCare.gov. Meanwhile, the quintessential Louisiana Democrat (and we're not talking about any of the Landrieus here) had this to say about the implications for November:

"Democratic voters might now be motivated to stand by the administration’s top legislative achievement more than ever — the same ABC/Post poll found that Democratic support for ObamaCare has reached 76 percent, which is up 11 percentage points from January. My fellow Democrats feared we didn’t have a motivating issue.... I like being on the side of healthcare consumer. I think that is a winning argument for Democrats." -- James Carville, "O-Care a Winning Bet for Dems," The Hill, April 1, 2014

Mr. Carville has an interesting proposition: instead of trying to divert attention from the healthcare law, Democrats should be embracing it. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), at the very least, did not dismiss the idea: 

"I never said we would run on [the Affordable Care Act]. That wasn't why we passed it. But we are not running away from it.... Elections are always about jobs and the economy." -- Nancy Pelosi, The New York Times, April 1, 2014

Like Rep. Pelosi, we're not ready to buy Mr. Carville's argument completely, but it did give us the idea to look at some interesting data. To get an eyeball estimate of whether there was a correlation between President Obama's approval rating, public approval of PPACA, and the generic ballot, we just made a few graphs. Here's what we got:

Data available at RealClearPolitics: "President Obama Job 
Approval", "Public Approval of Health Care Law", and
"Generic Congressional Ballot".

They're pretty suggestive: we see similar ups and downs, especially in the disapproval graph and the marginal graph. Now, as Randall Munroe of xkcd writes, correlation doesn't imply causation, but "it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'." We then looked into some more mathy regressions. Of all of the regressions we tried, the strongest and most significant correlation was this very simple one:

It demonstrates a strong and highly significant positive correlation between net approval of the healthcare law and the Democratic lead in the generic ballot. As we've shown, there's also a highly significant correlation between the generic ballot and the swing in House seats, so it's reasonable to conclude that public opinion of the healthcare law and Democratic performance in November.

So is Mr. Carville right? Could the incredibly controversial healthcare law be a success story Democrats can run on? That, like most things in life, depends. How policymakers gauge success is one thing, and there are a lot of variables about PPACA that we don't quite know: for example, the 7.1 million number doesn't include people who purchased insurance outside of the federal and state exchanges, but it also includes people who have signed up for insurance but haven't paid for it yet.

Ultimately, though, what's important for elections is not how policymakers view policy, but how the public views it. Right now Mr. Carville points to an upward trend in the past few weeks in the law's approval, and a corresponding downward trend in its disapproval. But the same trend, as shown by the graphs above, happened in late January, as well as in the middle of December. Meanwhile, the opposite trend took place around New Year's and in early February. So right now, we believe that there's still a possibility that the recent trend is just statistical noise, random fluctuations that just happen naturally as a result of sampling in the polls that are taken. Time will tell.

However, we do agree with Mr. Carville on one thing: both parties' strategies may hinge on what direction the opinion of PPACA takes. If PPACA, like Mr. Carville argues, really is on an upward trend, then Democrats in competitive seats may start to warm up to their law as their constituents are doing the same. Conversely, Republicans may begin backpedaling in their focus on the law as part of this cycle's campaign strategy. Because Republicans have made the law a centerpiece of their national campaign this year, it will be important to be on the lookout for any trends like this in the coming months.