Hoyer Finally Admits the Obvious: Health Care Bill Killed the Dems in 2010 - FDL [View all]

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Hoyer Finally Admits the Obvious: Health Care Bill Killed the Dems in 2010
By: Phoenix Woman - FDL
Saturday March 10, 2012 6:45 am

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Finally, over two years after Vic Snyder resigned after FDL confirmed what internal polling told him about it, over two years after Martha Coakley went from a nineteen-point lead to a loss to Scott Brown in the space of four weeks in part because of it, and a year and a half after the Democrats lost the House in large part because of it, Steny Hoyer says, in the wake of a new study proving it: http://mysite.du.edu/~smasket/Nyhan_et_al_APR.pdf what everyone in Official Washington circles knows to be true but most of the time won’t admit — the health care bill was frigging kryptonite to the Democrats in 2009 and 2010:

A top Democrat acknowledged Thursday that President Obama’s health care bill hurt his party in 2010. And a new study suggests it cost the Democrats something pretty specific: their House majority.

“It was clearly a liability in the last election in terms of the public’s fear,” House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Thursday during a briefing with reporters.

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The study ran 10,000 simulations of a scenario in which all vulnerable Democrats voted against the health care bill and found that the rejections would have saved Democrats an average of 25 seats, which would have made the House parties close to a tie. (Republicans won 63 seats overall, but the study suggests around 25 of them would have been salvaged.)

In 62 percent of the simulations, Democrats were able to keep the House.

Dear Reader –

What caused the members of Official Washington’s institutions, particularly those part of or linked to the institutional Democratic Party, to go after Jane Hamsher hammer and tongs?

Answer: Her insistence on pushing for at least a public option in the health care bill — and her warnings that without a public option (which poll after poll showed was the most popular part of the health care reform proposal as originally conceived, but which Obama and the Dems dumped in order to please industry lobbyists), the bill would become a deadly stinky rotting albatross of a millstone around the Democrats’ collective necks in November of 2010.

She was right, she was proved right, and now Steny Hoyer’s finally admitted it.

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More: http://firedoglake.com/2012/03/10/come-saturday-morning-hoyer-finally-admits-the-obvious-health-care-bill-killed-the-dems-in-2010/