Earlier this week, Todd Purdum claimed “that the future of the Democratic Party’s plausible agenda, and of liberalism itself, is on the line.” Nyhan counters Purdum and other journalists engaging in similar hyperbole:
[T]hese journalists are falling victim to the same extrapolation fallacy that pervades so much political coverage. In these sorts of stories, reporters identify a current trend and spin out a story in which it continues to implausible extremes. Consider two recent examples: the decline in President Obama’s standing in the polls after his first debate with Mitt Romney and the surge in Democrats’ standing in the generic House ballot during the government shutdown. In both cases, journalists extrapolated wildly from a short-term trend, hyping Romney’s “momentum”and the damage to the Republican brand and suggesting that the trends would continue in the direction indicated by the arrows in the graphs below.
But as the graphs show, any shifts in public opinion around those events were transitory. … Romney’s standing in the polls stabilized soon after the first debate. Likewise, the GOP quickly shifted from defense to offense after the media’s attention shifted from the shutdown to the healthcare rollout. While it is possible to imagine alternative scenarios (see, e.g., the breathless reporting in the 2012 campaign retrospective Double Down on how Obama narrowly averted a disastrous second debate), the reality is that national politicians and parties rarely self-destruct on the level that these predictions require. Democrats now face a policy challenge that is more difficult than overcoming a poor debate performance, but it is likely that the administration will fix enough problems to maintain party cohesion and prevent repeal, particularly once they can highlight benefits from the law that will become available in January.
Trende makes a version of the same argument:
This isn’t to say that a collapse of Obamacare would be without consequences. It would probably ruin the Democrats’ chances in 2014, perhaps leading to truly significant Republican gains in the Senate. Given that that chamber tends to be a natural Republican gerrymander, it would probably take Democrats some time to recover. But also given the current makeup of the House, further liberal legislation was likely going to have to wait for quite some time anyway.
And even if Obamacare does collapse, the most liberal aspects of the American health care system — Medicare and Medicaid — will still be around. Democrats have already been pretty straightforward about what their “Plan B” will be: Medicare/Medicaid for all. Both programs are still very popular, and the Democratic standard-bearer in 2016 would almost certainly campaign on expanding them, perhaps to those over 55 for Medicare and under 25 for Medicaid. I’m not sure that would be a losing issue, even with an Obamacare collapse. In 10 years, I think it’d be a winner.
I’ve written along these lines dozens of times regarding various attempts by commentators to bury conservatism or the Republican Party. But it is no less true of liberalism and the Democratic Party. The American electorate is not intensely ideological, and is more motivated by things such as the state of the economy, whether there is peace abroad (or whether we’re winning a war), and whether the president is suffering from a major scandal. Obamacare’s collapse wouldn’t be a good thing for liberalism. It wouldn’t even be neutral. But it wouldn’t be the end of the liberal ideology, either.
The Dish 