Pessimism about defeating President Donald Trump has spiked among Democratic strategists in recent months, between the tangled mess that is the Democratic presidential primary field and a series of polls showing tight races in the critical states Democrats need to flip.
But according to The Daily Beast, one group thinks they have the secret formula for beating Trump — and it's the same formula that led Democrats to victory in the 2018 midterm elections: Protect the Affordable Care Act.
"A group dedicated to defending the ACA, commonly known as Obamacare, is staking its claim in the political marketplace on the power of the hard-fought protections in Obamacare — including the expansion of Medicaid into 35 states — to carry the Democrats to victory in 2020," wrote Eleanor Clift. "'A winning election [for the Democrats] is a referendum on Donald Trump and health care,' says Leslie Dach, a former top executive at Walmart who chairs Protect Our Care (POC), a resistance group created after the 2016 election to counter Trump’s threat to kill Obamacare."
The problem, Dach noted, is that while health care is still many voters' number one issue — 85 percent support keeping the ACA's protections — many simply don't realize the depths to which the Trump administration is going to undermine the law, ever since Republicans dropped their legislative attempts to repeal it.
"Trump’s Justice Department is in court working to overturn the Affordable Care Act. Legislation that the House passed to rein in drug costs languishes in Mitch McConnell’s Senate graveyard, where Republicans show no interest in taking on the pharmaceutical industry," wrote Clift. "After Trump in his State of the Union speech repeated his pledge to protect people with preexisting conditions, a claim that has been thoroughly analyzed and debunked, Protect Our Care put together a digital video of pundit after pundit decrying the 'damnable lie.'"
"We don't know who the nominee is going to be," Dach told the Beast. "We're trying to convince the candidates to talk more about Donald Trump. We think it's a huge missed opportunity to be having a debate on a public option versus Medicare for All when what the voters care about is the cost of prescription drugs and the cost of premiums. That's what they should be talking about."
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