In Face of Healthcare Decision, Republicans Need to Stay Focused

As you've undoubtedly seen, the Supreme Court today ruled that the Affordable Care Act is in fact constitutional and also ruled that everyone who has been saying that it's not is in fact wrong. Devoted Republicans are outraged by this decision, and Mitt Romney has stated that it's now more important than ever to elect him president so he can repeal the ACA the first day he is in office. This statement works today, but by Monday morning Romney needs to pivot off of this issue and move back to the main issue in this election: the economy.

James Carville famously crafted Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign message: "the economy, stupid." His point was that whatever is going on inside the Beltway, we were in a recession and that's all that people on Main Street cared about. Everything that happened, Clinton needed to remind people that they weren't better off than they were four years ago and that economic conditions show no signs of getting better. This worked, and Bill Clinton was able to unseat an incumbent president who, several short months prior to the election, had unbelievably high approval ratings. Romney needs to learn a lesson from this.

The Republican echo chamber today is exploding with anger and pithy quotes about healthcare. I know this because my Twitter feed is almost exclusively retweets of Sarah Palin and various other party luminaries. (Don't worry, Governor McDonnell had a statement already prepared and released within minutes of the decision. I haven't read it, but I assume it was consistent with his statements on the UVA situation from last week and had something to do with keeping disagreements within the family and moving on quickly after decisive action was taken.) That's fine - this is a nice red meat issue that will get the party motivated and remind them why they need to turn out to defeat President Obama. But don't mistake this outrage for majority opinion, and don't mistake this outrage for being big enough to put together a winning coalition of voters in November. 

There are three reasons - the first involves voters not really having strong, crystallized opinions about healthcare. In a recent poll, approximately 30% of people had no opinion on what the Supreme Court should do on this case. The second involves Romney being the wrong messenger for the inappropriateness of state regulation of healthcare, especially this healthcare bill. But the third goes back to "the economy, stupid." The recovery is in doubt, Europe is looking as tenuous as ever, and the anemic growth from earlier in the year is now looking like the salad days of the economy. This may change again by September, but for now, Romney needs to hammer this home as hard has he can if he wants to win 51% of the population. Repealing healthcare is for the partisan diehards who are already on his team anyway, but winning elections requires more than appealing to the base (ask Sharron Angle). The economy is bad, and that's something all voters care about, and that's how you win elections.