That Sinking Feeling

On Tuesday Republican David Jolly defeated Democrat Alex Sink in a Florida House district election dubbed by some in the media as the “ground zero” of Obamacare and largely seen as a test battle ground for the upcoming Congressional midterm elections in November.

The election, which saw Jolly receive 48.5 percent of the vote compared to Sink’s 46.7 percent and Libertarian Lucas Overby’s 4.8 percent, was for the seat vacated by the late Bill Young, a Republican who represented the district for 42 years.

Seen as a pivotal precursor to the tone and outcome of November, both Republicans and Democrats poured in major money and called in big political guns, including Jeb Bush and Bill Clinton, in hopes of scoring a victory both symbolic and substantive.

That the immediate political gain would be negligible — Jolly has to run for re-election in eight months and the House is already controlled by Republicans — did not stop the more than $12 million that was poured into the race, with the Democrats outspending the Republicans by nearly $1 million. That amount was six times the average full-term House campaign in 2012.

Considering Jolly’s victory is a blow to the aspirations of Democrats looking to win elections by defending Obamacare, it was money well spent. The election was essentially a referendum on the President’s massive healthcare overhaul. Jolly called for its complete repeal, but Sink stuck her liberal core and constructed her electoral pitch around promises to fix the designed-to-fail, doomed-to-fail program.

Regardless of whether the numbers show a net gain or loss of health insurance policies in the state, the President’s broken promises (“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it”), a severely botched and embarrassing roll-out, Obamacare horror stories, the shock and sting of 300,000 cancelled policies in October of last year, and the overall disdain most conservatives and libertarians have for big government programs helped propel Jolly to an underdog victory.

It also did not help that Sink’s stance on immigration reform was this: “where are you going to get people to work to clean our hotel rooms or do our landscaping?” Of course, Media Matters tried to defend Sink by accusing conservatives of making similar comments – a red herring, scapegoating argument that does nothing to justify Sink’s statement – and by demonstrating that Sink is not a racist or an elitist but is actually pro-amnesty. Not so much of a defense.

Sink, who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2010 against Republican Rick Scott, carried this Tampa-area district in her gubernatorial run, as did Obama in both of his presidential elections. This district’s turnaround forebodes well for Republicans, who are looking to take back the Senate later this year by winning seats in less blue states like Arkansas, North Carolina, and Louisiana. Jolly’s victory is fuel to the anti-Obamacare fire kindling across the country, and his strategy of battering Democrats on the issue seems a sure way to set it ablaze come election day.

So powerful was the simple anti-Obamacre stance that voters overlooked his previous job as a Washington lobbyist and insider. Sink was Florida’s former Chief Financial Officer under Republican-turned-Independent-turned-Democrat former governor Charlie Crist. Perhaps she is now the captain of the tugboat dragging the Democratic Party to the depths of electoral defeat in November.