Douthat thinks it’s possible:
To the extent there’s any policy issue with the potential to actually scramble the 2016 primary season for Democrats, it’s probably the one that’s scrambling 2014 for them right now: Obamacare. That’s because if the law still isn’t working out as promised in two years time, and if President Obama ends up locked in some sort of agonized struggle with a Republican Congress over various controversial “fixes,” it isn’t clear exactly what the sweet spot for a Democratic candidate in 2016 will be. In Bill Clinton’s recent comments on how the law should be amended to let more people keep their plans, you can see a hint of one tack that his wife might take — essentially focusing on whatever looks like the least popular aspect of the fully-implemented law and promising to fix that.
But what if there isn’t an obvious, plausible fix for whatever might still be going wrong? And what if a piecemeal critique of the law from candidate Clinton ends up echoing whatever the G.O.P. talking points of 2015 happen to be? Could she then be attacked effectively as a sellout and a compromiser by a left-wing challenger who essentially campaigns against the insurance industry, and promises that the solution to Obamacare’s faults is the single-payer plan of liberal fantasy?
I still think the answer is, “no, probably not.” But if I were tasked with planning an anti-Hillary insurgency right now, I’d be thinking a lot more about how to pitch Medicare For All than about the exact details of my plan to blow up Wall Street.
Chait, on the other hand, argues that Wall Street regulation could be a major factor in the primaries:
It’s odd that a staggeringly lopsided issue has played so little a role in national politics the last five years. The initial 2008 bailout vote took place in emergency conditions, with the cooperation of a Democratic House and a Republican president, and so close to the election that neither party had the chance to tailor its campaign message to take advantage of the public backlash. Republicans subsequently benefited from the backlash against the financial bailout merely by being the opposition party, but they never crafted a serious agenda against Wall Street. President Obama fought for and passed a legislative response, the Dodd-Frank regulations, which placed him in the position of defending the status quo. That, in turn, helped provoke a wild, paranoid backlash on Wall Street, memorably chronicled by Gabriel Sherman, that drove the industry into a full alliance with the GOP. By the 2012 cycle, Wall Street had titled its donations heavily to Republicans, who were pledging to repeal Dodd-Frank while nominating a financier at the top of the ticket.
So what may be the most powerful issue in American politics has lay unused by either party since the crisis. Either party could pick it up. A bill to break up the big banks has the sponsorship of liberal Democrat Sherrod Brown and conservative Republican David Vitter. Warren has a tough regulatory proposal of her own, which has the support of John McCain. A Warren campaign could force Clinton to follow suit, and possibly even pressure the Republican nominee.
The Dish 