Democrat predictions on health care wrong

Politico:

Rarely have so many political strategists been so wrong about something so big.

But when it comes to the health care bill, everyone from former President Bill Clinton on down whiffed on some of the more significant predictions.

Democrats would run aggressively on the legislation? Nope. Voters would forget about the sausage-making aspects of the legislative process? Doesn’t seem that way, as the process contributed to the sense that the bill was deeply flawed.

And Clinton’s own promise to jittery Democrats that their poll numbers would skyrocket after the bill finally passed also didn’t pan out, as the party is fighting for its life in the midterms.

...

A week before final passage, Democratic pollsters Douglas Schoen and Pat Caddell, who had worked for Clinton, pierced the optimism. They wrote a Washington Post op-ed warning the party had deluded itself into thinking that Americans wanted the bill. And as a result, they wrote, Democrats ran the risk of “unmitigated disaster” in November.

The Washington establishment responded in kind. Obama pollster Joel Benenson shot back that Schoen and Caddell were peddling “Republican myths.” The American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Ornstein and the Brookings Institution’s Thomas Mann penned a response column that started out by describing Schoen and Caddell as “disgruntled (if not former) Democrats.”

Nobody knows whether Democrats would be doing any better if they abandoned the health care push. They would have owned the issue regardless, given how long they had spent on it.

But six months later, Schoen and Caddell were more accurate in their predictions than their former boss: Public attitudes towards the legislation remain as negative and divided as when Obama signed it into law.

...

There is much more.

Democrat wishful thinking has gotten them in a deeper mess. Voters were telling them at the time they did not want the bill and the pollsters were tracking those numbers. I said at the time the only thing worse for Democrats than failing to pass health care, was passing it. The process exposed the cynical politics of the proponents and turned off voters even more than some of the specifics of the plan they opposed.