EdCone.com

When Josh Marshall refers to "the quality of the race [Hagan] ran," what exactly does he mean?

The endless negative ads that left even supporters weary?

The failure to veer from the DC playbook and take a stand on something other than "Kochs bad, er, War on Women!"?

The inability to tap into the very real dismay with Raleigh that has motivated many North Carolinians for two years?

Because those are the qualities I saw in the race she ran.

It's possible that Kay had almost no shot last night, given the way things broke across the country. But she damn sure wasn't winning with that campaign. 

I read TPM for outside-the-bubble thinking. This analysis I could get from network teevee.

Kay Hagan should hold a press conference outside of MoCoHo and demand to know what Thom Tillis means when he talks about repealing Obamacare. 

Does he want to go back to screening out people with pre-existing conditions?

Kick young adults off family policies?

Uninsure the millions who have gained coverage?

Undo the success of the ACO program, which is making a big difference here in GSO?

If not, what's his plan for keeping the stuff people like, and paying for it?

Not that Tillis talks much about ACA anymore. After months of positive news, he can't afford to be pinned down on what his alleged repeal plan would really mean. You have to dig at his campaign site for Obamacare bashing.

But Kay's site also avoids the issue. She's running a three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust campaign and is afraid that the law's lingering stigma will hurt her.

Which it will, if she and/or Democratic supporters don't get the message out.  

The shifting ACA narrative (sing along, you know the words) claims Obamacare is...

• a botched website
• DOA 
• not reaching young people
• not getting premiums paid 
• only having a small impact
• not reaching millions of people
• not reaching that many millions of people
• not reaching 20 million people

When your argument is about massiveness of scale, just six months in, it may be time to change the subject. Hey, look at those kids crossing the border!

If the Hagan campaign won't do it, outside funders need to start running ads right now that discuss the success of this law -- in numbers, and in human terms -- and the impact of Tillis-led Medicaid stonewalling. 

Your state’s decision not to expand health coverage is creating two Americas: one where millions are benefiting from preventive care and covered treatments while local economies get stronger and healthier by the day; and another where patients continue to show up to emergency rooms without a way to pay and the local economies are falling further and further behind. 

Kay Hagan signs a letter to governors, including our own, from states that have not accepted Medicaid expansion. 

The letter is about Medicaid, but refers directly to the ACA. Hagan needs to hammer home the message that burgeoning healthcare coverage = ACA = Obamacare = no exclusion for pre-existing conditions etc. 

And she should emphasize the importance of personal stories and personal responsibility. As long as people are going to get healthcare in some way -- and they are, and they should -- they should have some way of paying for it. 

Related: "Ms. Marks had a hole in her tooth this winter, she said, and went to the emergency room. They gave her a painkiller and a bill for $600, which she has ignored. The tooth remains so damaged that she can chew on only one side of her mouth."

Our system -- and those of us with private insurance -- are paying for this kind of inadequate care already. Rationalizing payment and delivery is the smart and humane way to go.

Thom Tillis is an ACA-repeal dead-ender, but significant elements of the GOP are moving away from that position.

Having staved off his hard-right primary challengers, Tillis will find it difficult to tack toward the center now. 

That's Hagan's opportunity. 

Ask him about the parts of the law that everyone loves, then watch him stammer.

Acknowledging there are parts worth saving is a step into the quicksand.

What would he preserve? How would he do that? Isn't that just a version of mend-it-don't-end-it?

And if he says kill it all, tee up the adds showing a nice lady who was able to start her own business despite a pre-existing condition.

Owning it at last, and taking the fight to Tillis.

Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC) used her time to trumpet the benefits of Medicaid expansion -- and emphasize the downside of not expanding.

Left unsaid, but strongly implied, was that her opponent, North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis, who locked up the GOP nomination earlier this week, had been instrumental in stopping the state from expanding Medicaid under the law.

"Last year in North Carolina, our state legislature and governor decided against expanding the state's Medicaid program," Hagan said as she started her questioning, "and as a result, about 500,000 people who would have qualified for coverage through Medicaid are not now able to do so."

Meanwhile, the Tillis campaign this morning sent out a rambling email about Hagan and Obamacare and how Tillis doesn't think Obamacare is a great idea even though Hagan said he does and Hagan is running away from it anyway.

That last part may no longer be the case, which would be great.  

This bit of number-crunching from the post-Nate Silver NYT shows a couple of things: 

• Kay Hagan has tough, tough road ahead of her.
• Number-crunching without context is of limited value.

The voter-turnout analysis certainly looks grim for Hagan -- but the article ignores some key factors that might influence turnout.

Like, say, the long-running and highly-visible protest movement against the GOP regime in Raleigh, and the underlying ire upon which that movement is built. Hagan could well have a more motivated base in 2014 than is typical of off-year elections, and a sophisticated GOTV machine to activate it. 

Writer Nate Cohn seems to be looking at statistics in a vaccum (he also ignores factors like the extreme dysfunction of the NCDP, and the influence of outside money). The raw numbers tell a story, but they don't tell the whole story.

Kay Hagan needs a really good Get Out The Vote effort to hold onto her seat.

More than a year ago, she assured me her campaign would build on the formidable GOTV machine built by Obama in 2008. That seems to be happening.

But the GOP has put a lot of resources into catching up with the Democrats in terms of technology. While I'm sure the Democrats have not been standing still, closing tech gaps -- or even leap-frogging them, as the Democrats did between 2000 and 2008 -- is very doable. 

And the best GOTV tech won't overcome a lack of enthusiasm. 

Here's where Hagan has an advantage some of her Senatorial peers may lack. North Carolina progressives are highly pissed off at the GOP regime in Raleigh. They're looking for reasons to love the moderate Hagan.

She's already running against Raleigh, which is smart. 

You know what would be smarter? To run against Raleigh's obstructionist strategy on healthcare. 

ACA is yours in this race no matter what, Kay. Owning it is good politics, and good GOTV fodder for the liberal wing of your party.

Items listed under the "Issues" tab at KayHagan.com: 

• Jobs and the Economy
• Education
• Military and Veterans
• Women's Issues
• Agriculture
• Seniors

Item not listed: Healthcare.

Seriously.

Like if they ignore it, it will go away.

As if it's not Kind of a Big Deal Around Here.

I've been banging on the Hagan campaign for months about this. 

Maybe they'll listen to the President and the NYT.

Obama: "I think there is a strong, good, right story to tell."

NYT: "When one of those programs begins to do its job, its authors shouldn’t be afraid to say so."

Obamacare is doing pretty well.

The numbers aren't just better than they were this winter, they're better than many supporters of the ACA allowed themselves to hope they would be. 

The law is far from perfect. The rollout has not been flawless, either, even beyond the deliberate sabotage inflicted upon it in many states. 

But at this point, the unreconstructed failure narrative -- the essential GOP talking point of the past few years, rising in volume with the website fiasco late last year -- sounds like a press conference conducted by Baghdad Bob.

None of which necessarily gets Kay Hagan reelected.

But the good news on ACA -- which is to say, good news on healthcare and good news for millions of Americans -- doesn't just give Kay the green light on those Hal Riney-esque ads I've been pitching.

It creates a nasty wedge issue to use against her eventual opponent.

As noted here, "GOP [...] strategists have started to hint that flat opposition - repeal with no alternative that provides something like the same range of benefits - may no longer be viable from a political standpoint."

My guess is that a lot of hardcore Obamacare-haters in NC are not ready for that reality. So if Tillis is the nominee and mouths some ACA-lite platitudes, the base will be furious; if he tries a harder line, he risks his credibility with the rest of the voters.

And if Tillis is not the nominee, Hagan's chances look better from the start.

Kay Hagan owns Obamacare in this year's Senate campaign, so she should make the most of it. 

In February, I wrote that "Obamacare will need to maintain the momentum it's gained for this campaign to work, so pushback ads probably can't run until April." 

So, April, and the numbers look pretty good. I'd start running ads now. Feel-good stories about the stuff even GOP strategists know they can't roll back -- families with insurance, people with pre-existing conditions who got coverage, and so on. Positive positive positive. Like an old Hal Riney spot for Reagan, or a Coke commercial. 

Meanwhile, Hagan's eventual opponent is about to be the victim of some serious elephant-on-elephant violence, If she's lucky, this will continue into an ugly and expensive run-off. If the GOP survivor is an unrepentant ACA repealer, the changing healthcare narrative presents a problem; if the nominee is more in the Richard Burr Obamacare-lite mold, the base will be furious. (A local version of this drama is reviewed here.)

Last time around, Hagan surprised much of the country by winning a race she was supposed to lose, but it wasn't such a shock if you paid attention along the way. Early days, but it looks like it could happen again. 

Joe Guarino comes out swinging against outside money in the NC Senate race, calling the massive infusion of cash "profoundly wrong and unjust on several levels." 

More: 

The 17th Amendment to the constitution clearly intends that the people of North Carolina choose their United States Senator. Our extraconstitutional party system determines who the major nominees will be. It is terribly wrong that out-of-state, wiser-than-thou national party bosses have such a disproportionate influence on choosing the state's nominee. This is supposed to be for Carolinians to decide. 

To be clear, Joe is pissed about Karl Rove funding Thom Tillis, but I'm sure the same logic applies to those Koch-financed anti-Hagan ads and the general election. (Sidenote: I rarely see North Carolinians refer to themselves as "Carolinians.")

Joe's a Brannon man. I've seen Brannon supporters, like Palin fans before them, say Democrats pay so much attention to their favorites because they fear them. Trust me on this one: North Carolina Democrats are rooting for Brannon just as hard as Joe is. This GOP primary is Kay Hagan's dream scenario; combined with her ability to run against Raleigh and the improving ACA story, her seat looks a lot safer than it did a few months back. 

Ronald Reagan is sometimes credited with this nugget of political wisdom: "If you're explaining, you're losing."

Right now GOP Senate hopeful Greg Brannon has got some 'splainin to do.

The candidate favored by Rand Paul, Glenn Beck, and our own C4GC recently was found by a jury to have misled investors in a tech company where he served as a director. Brannon has to pay back $250K, although he says he did nothing wrong and will appeal. 

That's good enough for some of his supporters, but it's hard to see Brannon's protestations convincing a lot of GOP primary voters who aren't already in his camp that the Cary obstetrician is not damaged goods. (Brannon isn't the only MD running as a GOP outsider to find himself in hot water last week.)

One person who must be hoping that Brannon survives the primary is Kay Hagan, who is tasked with plenty of explaining of her own over the ACA. 

If you are looking for a much more detailed version of the strategy I outlined yesterday ("Force the GOP establishment to put some daylight between themselves and the repeal-only dead-enders, then hammer them on the specifics of maintaining the parts of ACA that people love") you can read one here.

That's the thing about dead ends, they don't leave you any place to go but backwards. 

[P]arty leaders have decided on an aggressive new strategy to address the widespread unease with the health care law, urging Democratic candidates to talk openly about the law’s problems while also offering their own prescriptions to fix them.

This is a step in the right direction.

But Democrats shouldn't underemphasize other aspects of the strategy mentioned at the end of the article -- "optimism when talking about the law" and the fact that repeal would be a disaster.

Move the debate to what works and what comes next. Force the GOP establishment to put some daylight between themselves and the repeal-only dead-enders, then hammer them on the specifics of maintaining the parts of ACA that people love.

You could start here. Some of these "older Americans who lost jobs during the recession" live in NC. Put them on TV, now.

Here's an ad attacking Thom Tillis for his alleged stance on health insurance reform.

It's paid for by Patriot Majority USA, a DC-based advocacy group that doesn't want to tell you much about itself but seems closely tied to Democratic leadership and union funding. Complaining about opaque, out-of-state organizations pumping money into this campaign is going to be like complaining about the weather, which is to say common, legit, and useless.

The ad is deemed by people who follow such as things as, essentially, true enough (credit WRAL with a reasonable caveat for the months ahead: "It's hard to imagine any 30-second attack ad on health care getting a clean bill of health.") 

As for effectiveness, it does an OK job of reminding North Carolinians that Kay Hagan's presumptive opponent (and, really, any GOP nominee) will either be against the stuff that people unabashedly like about the ACA, or have some not-very-convincing plan to repeal it and fund the popular parts only. This commercial is not as polished as the rival AFP spots, and I'd guess it's not supposed to be. While the anti-Hagan ads carry a dual message -- "Obamacare failed, and, we really do care about reg folks like you" -- this one has a single, blunt point to make.

I'd like to see some Obamacare messages voiced in a more positive way. Show me a guy from Rocky Mount who has coverage despite a pre-existing condition, and a woman from Pineville who was able to leave her job and start a company of her own. Let's hear from some of the surprisingly-large number of North Carolinians who have signed up for coverage in our exchange-free state. Less happy stories work, too -- say, from individuals and institutions hurt by the failure to expand Medicaid -- but those still would be grounded in the intended benefits of the ACA. 

Attack ads seem to be effective, so I don't expect them to go away. But I prefer a positive message, and I think it's important for Hagan to stake a claim to the good things she helped bring about.

So here's another anti-Obamacare ad aimed at Kay Hagan, running now across the state with the frequency that big out-of-state money can buy.

Like the spot discussed here, this commercial is carefully constructed in terms of tone and feeling. It's not a red-meat call for repeal, but a pitch to moderate voters by a soft-spoken woman who seems disappointed that she has to deliver this critique of the Affordable Care Act: "It just doesn't work." 

It's another effective ad, but also one that shows how the conversation about healthcare reform is changing -- and how Hagan can fight back (as noted in the previous post, Hagan is going to own Obamacare in this race whether she wants to or not, so she'd better make the best of it). For starters, the ad reflects the reality acknowledged by the Burr/Coburn/Hatch proposal -- our healthcare system really was broken and something has to be done to fix it (another inadvertent lesson of the GOP plan: coming up with a workable strategy is not easy). 

The pushback should begin by pointing to ways that the ACA is working. That means addressing claims about the damage done by Obamacare, correcting any misstatements or overstatements, and promising to fix what's not right. And it means telling the stories of real people who have benefited from the changes to date. It means saying, "It does work."

Of course, Obamacare will need to maintain the momentum it's gained for this campaign to work, so pushback ads probably can't run until April. It would be very helpful if North Carolina's surprisingly strong enrollment numbers continue to trend upward. And Hagan is going to need a whole lot of money to move the needle after the long barrage of ads against her.

But pushing back against this campaign is possible, and, again, the only choice Hagan really has. 

This week a Senator from North Carolina acknowledged that "Our nation’s health care system was unsustainable before Obamacare" and promised to defend such core principles of the Affordable Care Act as broader access to insurance and coverage for people with pre-existing conditions.

That Senator was Richard Burr.

The plan he was promoting would replace the ACA with a new law, but clearly the goalposts have moved and the GOP establishment (Burr was joined by Orrin Hatch and Tom Coburn) now believes that Obamacare defines the healthcare debate; they’re talking means more than ends. Nobody understands this better than the folks to the right who hate Burr's idea the most.

Kay Hagan should be taking notes. She’s going to own Obamacare in this election whether she wants to or not, so she’d better figure out a way to leverage it to her advantage. And that may turn out to be a good strategy in and of itself.

This would have sounded crazy a month ago, but less so now. It’s still too early to tell, but the national signup trends are positive – and the North Carolina trends are surprisingly robust, indicating that a lot of Hagan’s constituents want to be having this conversation. The further we get from the botched website launch, the easier it may be to separate that genuine disaster from the actual program -- the program that does all the things that Burr recognizes as appealing to many voters.

None of which makes the own-it strategy easy, or makes Hagan a lock for reelection. North Carolina has a habit of ditching senators after one term. Much of the state is still in severe economic pain and Obamacare will always be a red flag for some voters, even those who might support the Lite version floated by Burr. And there’s a flood of money coming into the state to take Hagan down (credit the folks who made this ad with understanding the semiotics of North Carolina; from the color of the speaker's shirt to her hometown, the spot is pitched right at the centrist voters it means to reach).

But Hagan has real advantages, too. GOP rule in Raleigh has motivated Democrats like nothing I’ve seen before, and her likely opponent, Thom Tillis, is part of that operation. I’ve been told by insiders that Hagan will have a GOTV machine that builds on Obama’s statewide success in that realm (although I have no recent verification that this is actually happening). It’s possible to imagine a campaign in which Hagan stands up for the ACA (and talks about fixes for its problems) while pinning Tillis down between some form of Obamacare Lite and the hardcore repealers.

It could work, and I don't see another way for her to win.