The gubernatorial and Senate campaigns in Maryland this year are presenting a nice example of one of the major subthemes of Election 2006: the overwhelming price that Blue State Republicans are finally paying for the sins of their national party. Maryland GOPers went into the home stretch of this general election feeling pretty good about their prospects. Incumbent Gov. Bob Erlich had relatively high approval ratings, huge sacks of cash with which to impugn the mayoral record of Democratic nominee Martin O’Malley, and a reputation for closing well, given his upset win over Kathleen Kennedy Townsend four years ago. Their Senate nominee, Michael Steele, was perfectly positioned to exploit African-American disappointment with Kweisi Mfume’s Democratic primary loss to Ben Cardin. Steele was also running some of the best ads of the cycle, and doing everything imaginable to distance himself from George W. Bush. A new Washington Post poll of Maryland just out today indicates none of that much matters. Among likely voters, the poll has O’Malley up over Ehrlich 55-45, and Cardin up over Steele 54-43. Almost nobody appears to be undecided, though 15% of voters said they could change their minds. (This led Republicans to challenge the poll’s methodology, though the Post has a track record of very conservative polling techniques, and a low undecided count is not unusual in nationalized midterm elections with well-known candidates). The internals of the Post poll show that a lot of Maryland Democratic moderate voters that Democrats lost in 2002 are returning to the Donkey Ticket, and that Steele is not making much headway at all among African-Americans. There are other polls out there showing both races as closer, but the Post’s relatively large sample and good reputation makes me think this poll is probably spot-on. And given Erlich and Steele’s strengths, this is yet another bad sign for the GOP heading towards November 7. The Republican wave of 1994 depended in no small part on the inability of southern and western Democrats, however well-tailored for their states and districts, to separate themselves from a national party that had lost credibility with local voters. The same thing seems to be happening to Republicans in the northeast and midwest this year.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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March 24: The Republican Case Against Medicaid Expansion Continues to Crumble
There’s another turn in a story we’ve all been following for over a decade, so I wrote it up at New York:
The Affordable Care Act was signed into law 13 years ago, and the Medicaid expansion that was central to the law still hasn’t been implemented in all 50 states. But we are seeing steady, if extremely slow, progress in the effort to give people who can’t afford private insurance but don’t qualify for traditional Medicaid access to crucial health services. The U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the ACA also made Medicaid expansion optional for states. Twenty-four states accepted the expansion when it became fully available at the beginning of 2014, and that number has steadily expanded, with the most recent burst of forward momentum coming from ballot initiatives in red states like Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Utah. Now a 40th state is in the process of climbing on board: North Carolina. As the Associated Press reports, legislation is finally headed toward the desk of Governor Roy Cooper:
“A Medicaid expansion deal in North Carolina received final legislative approval on Thursday, capping a decade of debate over whether the closely politically divided state should accept the federal government’s coverage for hundreds of thousands of low-income adults. …
“When Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, a longtime expansion advocate, signs the bill, it should leave 10 states in the U.S. that haven’t adopted expansion. North Carolina has 2.9 million enrollees in traditional Medicaid coverage. Advocates have estimated that expansion could help 600,000 adults.”
So what changed? Basically, over time the fiscal arguments North Carolina Republicans used to oppose the expansion began sounding increasingly ridiculous, AP suggests:
“GOP legislators passed a law in 2013 specifically preventing a governor’s administration from seeking expansion without express approval by the General Assembly. But interest in expansion grew over the past year as lawmakers concluded that Congress was neither likely to repeal the law nor raise the low 10% state match that coverage requires.
“A financial sweetener contained in a COVID-19 recovery law means North Carolina also would get an estimated extra $1.75 billion in cash over two years if it expands Medicaid. Legislators hope to use much of that money on mental health services.”
In other words, the GOP Cassandras warning that the wily Democrats would cut funding for the expansion in Congress once states were hooked turned out to be absolutely wrong. Indeed, the very sweet deal offered in the original legislation got even sweeter thanks to the above-mentioned COVID legislation. States like North Carolina appeared to be leaving very good money on the table for no apparent reason other than partisanship, seasoned with some conservative hostility toward potential beneficiaries. In this case, GOP legislators finally reversed course without much excuse-making. The AP reports:
“A turning point came last May when Senate leader Phil Berger, a longtime expansion opponent, publicly explained his reversal, which was based largely on fiscal terms.
“In a news conference, Berger also described the situation faced by a single mother who didn’t make enough money to cover insurance for both her and her children, which he said meant that she would either end up in the emergency room or not get care. Expansion covers people who make too much money for conventional Medicaid but not enough to benefit from heavily subsidized private insurance.
“’We need coverage in North Carolina for the working poor,’ Berger said at the time.”
That, of course, has been true all along. Final legislative approval of the expansion was delayed for a while due to an unrelated dispute over health-facility regulations. And the expansion cannot proceed until a state budget is passed. But it’s finally looking good for Medicaid expansion in a place where Democrats and Republicans are bitterly at odds on a wide range of issues.
There remain ten states that have not yet expanded Medicaid; eight are Republican “trifecta” states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming) and two others have Republican-controlled legislatures (Kansas and Wisconsin). Perhaps the peculiar mix of stupidity and malice that keeps state lawmakers from using the money made available to them by Washington to help their own people will abate elsewhere soon.