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

Why We Haven't Done All that Much with the House [WARNING: MATH AHEAD]

It's recommended that liberal arts majors turn back at this point. Or skip to the very bottom.

Most of the stuff you'll see on here is about the Senate. We've got a real nice map of our current forecast on the right-hand sidebar with nice colors, and there's a nice long summary of analyses of the 36 Senate races this year (also with nice colors).

So, you might wonder, what about the 435 House races?

There are a couple reasons we haven't gone into as much detail about House races as we have with Senate ones. First, the poll-to-race ratio is a lot lower than that for Senate races. We're still a good seven months off from the election, and the most competitive Senate races have considerable polling already by respected firms. By contrast with the House, there are about 40 competitive (Toss-Up or Leans toward one party) races as reported by Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball via 270towin.com. The number of races is large, congressmen are less well known than senators, and the races are almost always more localized than Senate races, so the audience for polls of individual House races is a lot smaller. It's simply not worth the money to conduct those polls.