Democratic Senate Candidates Relish Chance to Run on Obamacare After Trump Floats Repeal

Democratic Senate candidates across the country are relishing the notion of playing off former President Donald Trump’s renewed calls to repeal the Affordable Care Act if he wins the presidency next year.

Trump’s recent pledge to “REPLACE IT with MUCH BETTER HEALTHCARE” gives these Democrats, many of whom ran on fighting the repeal of the popular health care law in 2018, a chance to retool their winning message from six years ago. Polls show that 60% of adults have a favorable view of the ACA, commonly known as Obamacare.

In Ohio, Democrats aligned with Sen. Sherrod Brown jumped on Trump’s comments, using them to attack the three top Republicans vying to take on the incumbent next year. Reeves Oyster, a spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party, pledged Ohio voters “will know that Bernie Moreno, Frank LaRose, and Matt Dolan would attack their access to health care and side with insurance companies."

In Nevada, a spokesperson for Sen. Jacky Rosen’s reelection bid accused Republican Senate frontrunner Sam Brown of “threatening the Affordable Care Act and its protections for pre-existing conditions,” pledging that Rosen would look to “lower costs for Nevada families” and “protect their access to health care.”

In Pennsylvania, Democratic Sen. Bob Casey responded to Trump by saying, “You can bet that I’ll always fight back against MAGA Republican attempts to take coverage away from Pennsylvania families, including those with pre-existing conditions.”

And in Wisconsin, Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, someone who was involved in writing the healthcare law, has long used her role in crafting the bill as a key portion of her stump speech. Andrew Mamo, a Baldwin campaign spokesperson, said the senator has “run on the ACA and won before, and she’ll do it again in November.”

All of this comes after Trump, in a post on his social media site Truth Social, said he was “looking at alternatives” to the law and later doubled down on the comment by saying he wanted to repeal and “REPLACE IT with MUCH BETTER HEALTHCARE.” It’s reminiscent of Trump’s promises during the 2016 election and throughout his time in office, including his failed attempt to repeal Obamacare in 2017. While Trump often promised a better replacement for the law that passed in 2010, he put forward few ideas. 

Trump’s latest comments surprised some Republicans, many of whom have privately and publicly cautioned the party from talking extensively about healthcare given it was partly to blame for the losses Republicans took in the 2018 midterms.

“Repealing Obamacare was not a winning issue for us in 2018, so most Republican Senate candidates are not going to be re-litigating that issue,” said a national Republican strategist who works on Senate campaigns. “They will instead be talking about ways to lower health care prices and prescription drug costs for the American people.”

Other Republicans who had to deal with the Obamacare issue in 2018 don’t see this cycle as comparable to six years ago.

“The environment today is dramatically different than it was for these members in 2018,” said Jesse Hunt, who worked at the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2018. “Their party wasn’t in power like it is today and they didn’t have an incredibly unpopular incumbent president.”

Trump’s comments could put Republican Senate candidates in a tough position, however, given many of these candidates are vying for his support in a primary and don’t want to be seen as breaking with their party’s preeminent power center.

“President Trump was right from day one,” said Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, one of three candidates running for the state’s Republican Senate nomination. “Obamacare continues to be a disaster and I will work with him when I’m in the U.S. Senate to fix the many mistakes of the Obama and Biden administrations.”

Other possible Republican candidates, like businessman Scott Mayer in Wisconsin, dodged the question, telling The Messenger that didn’t “have any good feedback… on Obamacare at this point” but that “what I’m hearing from constituents is it’s gotten very, very expensive.” Eric Hovde, another Wisconsin businessman considering challenging Baldwin, did not respond to a request for comment, but said in 2012 that he would “repeal [Obamacare] in its entirety.”

Other Republicans have been in favor of repealing the law for years.

In a 2018 interview, Michigan businessman Sandy Pensler — who just launched another Senate campaign Friday — told WSYM that “ we have to completely repeal Obamacare, ACA, whatever you want to call it, and we have to put market mechanisms in place.” 

When Brown in Nevada ran for a House seat in Texas, he made fighting Obamacare a top issue of his campaign and said during a candidate forum that Obamacare was not something he (or his Republican opponents) wanted to adopt in “any way, shape, or form.”

Former Rep. Mike Rogers, one of the Republicans running for Senate in Michigan, voted against the health care law during his time in Congress, labeled it “disastrous,” and called for it to be undone. Former Rep. Peter Meijer, another Michigan Senate candidate, signed a pledge in 2020 that would called for the repeal of the law, a position he later sought to clarify as someone he wouldn’t do until there was a replacement plan in place. And Kari Lake, the top Republican Senate candidate in Arizona, called for getting rid of Obamacare during her failed gubernatorial run in 2022 – “We need to overturn Obamacare and come up with something better,” she said – and said recently that the law should have been repealed under Trump.

“We had an opportunity under President Trump when he first got in to repeal Obamacare and find a better alternative. And unfortunately, at the time, there were too many people secretly working against President Trump at that time,” she said, an apparent reference to the late Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain, who voted against the repeal.

And in Democrat’s longshot offensive Senate targets in 2024 – running against Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Florida Sen. Rick Scott – both Republicans have been top proponents of getting rid of Obamacare, with Cruz shutting down the government in 2013 to try to defund the law. As governor of Florida, Scott was a staunch opponent of the health care law, going as far to say that he would not implement the law in the state. 

“I hope and I believe that either it will be declared unconstitutional or it will be repealed,” he told reporters in February 2011. 

All of this, said David Bergstein, communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, will be central to Democratic messaging in 2024.

“Republicans have guaranteed that their agenda to increase health care costs and gut coverage protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions will be a major issue in the 2024 Senate campaigns,” he said. “In race after race, voters have punished Republican candidates for threatening their health care coverage, and they’ll do the same next November.”