You don’t plan to lose obviously for strategic benefit, but often in hindsight it’s better to lose. Both parties lose elections. But bad Presidencies are game changers.
It’s not a coincidence that the Republicans are at their strongest in Congress and the states in decades. Sure, it seems better NOW that Obama is President, but if Republicans sweep in 2016 and undo ACA and other Obama initiative, then history will look back on his Presidency as utterly pointless.
Short answer: gerrymandering. It’s not because of Obama, it’s in reaction to Obama. Not the same thing.
If Republicans undo ACA, cutting off millions’ of people’s access to healthcare out of sheer spite, it will make the attempted impeachment of a sitting President over a blowjob look brilliant by comparison.
I guarantee that repealing it will cost Republicans less seats than passing it did for Democrats.
It’s also not a coincidence that disapproval of Congress is at historic highs.
The ACA will not be repealed.
And truth be told if those of the establishment wing thought that there was any chance that voting for a repeal would actually result in one they would bite the bullet and vote against repealing it.
First and most importantly to them too much has been invested by too many interests, including corporate ones. Change is hard and it is expensive. Second people love to bitch about it but disappear the benefits they’ve now gained and you’d see people really pissed.
That’s why they have to have the “replace” part down pat. It doesn’t have to be as good as ACA, it just has to satisfy enough people already receiving it as well as the few special interests benefitting from it( the insurance companies not yet among them, so they won’t care),so that the only real outrage is from Democratic partisans who just realized that Obama’s administration ended up being meaningless.
But ACA has to go away or be made to fail for a few reasons:
A lot of political capital has been invested in getting rid of it. At the very least, the Republicans will have to repeal the mandate, because it’s awfully hard to distract your base with other things when they are forking over a thousand or more in extra taxes.
There’s a lot of partisan rancor around that law. The Democrats passed a new entitlement by a partisan margin, the first time that’s ever happened. They need to be taught that you can’t do that, otherwise we’ll get new entitlements every time the Democrats get a short window like they did in 2009.
The attraction of making Obama’s administration utterly pointless is going to be hard to resist. And as noted above, it would send a message to future administrations: anything you do can be undone, so don’t do big things unless you have enough public support. Sometimes the Democrats’ instinct for cowardice is wise and they ignored those instincts in the face of ACA’s unpopularity. Which brings us to #4
The Democrats who constantly preach caution will have been vindicated and the party will become even more demoralized and listless than they’ve normally been. They passed a big dream of theirs, got their asses handed to them electorally, and then lost it anyway. AFter the initial outrage, the party would be deflated and defeated.
Yes, if the Republican wins, the ACA is in serious trouble, as is Obama’s legacy. And if the Democrat wins, then the ACA will keep on truckin’, and Obama’s legacy will be stronger.
Possibly. The jury is still out on whether the law can succeed even without repeal. The companies on the exchange still aren’t making money.
The law has already had enormous success in reducing the amount of uninsured. Assuming a Democrat wins in 2016, tweaks to improve other aspects of the law will become likely.
The tweak it needs is to give the mandate teeth, which is politically impossible.
But to stay on topic, all of the GOP candidates, moderate and extreme, have promised to repeal ACA, so unless some more important crisis comes up after a GOP win, it’s happening. It’s slightly less likely to happen if Kasich or Christie or Bush are elected, because they’ll have more important priorities they want addressed first.
And GOP presidential candidates can be counted on to keep every promise when they win. “We’re going to cut taxes and balance the budget!” has been a promise virtually every Republican has made. So why didn’t either Bush or Reagan do it?
Somehow I don’t trust that you have the best interests of the ACA at heart. 
Unless the GOP candidate doesn’t win.
The ACA isn’t getting repealed, but a GOP president could probably muck with it in enough ways to make it more inefficient than it would otherwise be.
Full repeal would take 60 votes in the Senate, which will never happen. Of course, the GOP could eliminate the legislative filibuster entirely, but that just means that the Dems would pass a single payer plan the next time they control the House and have 51 senators.
Because of King v. Burwell, a GOP president cannot just arbitrarily cut off the subsidies to two-thirds of the country either.
Probably the best the Pubs could do is repeal/relax the IM, which would only require 51 votes. They might also be able to undo expanded Medicaid in that way, but that would lead to a fuckuva lot of outrage in huge swaths in the country.
Of course, the fact that Bevin won in KY specifically on a pledge to undo the Medicaid expansion in that state suggests that, for at least part of the ACA’s beneficiaries, enough people are stupid/idiotic enough to vote against their own interests and have their HC taken away.
Budget reconciliation can gut it pretty thoroughly.
Wouldn’t surprise me if some of those Medicaid recipients used to have real health insurance.
It would me. Medicaid financial requirements, even after expansion, demand that a family of four earn less than $39,501 for eligibility. It would surprise me to find that a family grossing $3k/month had “real” health insurance prior to the ACA - it was precisely these families that the ACA was designed to capture into the insurance pools.
Depends on who you worked for.
You have more knowledge of how vetoes work than you do of the Republican replacement bill, don’t you?
Vetoes exist.