The Midterm Election Was About Health Care 

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK – By mid-morning on Election Day, poll site volunteer Kelly Viselman had already been talking with voters outside P.S. 30 elementary school in New York’s Tenth Congressional District for hours. Democratic victories in that district were all but assured, including for the Tenth District’s Democratic candidate Brad Lander, who won nearly 84 percent of the vote to beat Republican Jennifer Moore. But Viselman was there with fellow Jews for Racial & Economic Justice volunteers (plus her friendly chihuahua Lou), to encourage people to vote for Democrats along Row D, the Working Families Party line. 

The progressive minority party needs to draw 130,000 votes to keep its automatic representation on the ballot. But state director Jasmine Gripper set a goal of at least 250,000 votes along the Working Families line for incumbent Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul’s ticket, which would send a message to establishment Democrats that voters want them to move left, including on their demand for Medicare for All, Viselman said. That’s been a top concern among voters she’s spoken to throughout the midterm cycle. It’s tangled up with their other top concern, affordability, and is very literally a matter of life or death. It’s no wonder, Viselman said, that “there’s a trend towards progressive candidates who will provide what people need to live.” 

Voters illustrated the point yesterday, when they elected numerous candidates who support Medicare for All, a policy that has a “stunning” level of support across party lines, including in battleground states, as the Prospect reported. Those winners included candidates up and down the ballot across the country: Lander and his fellow New York progressive representatives-elect, Darializa Avila Chevalier in the 13th Congressional District and Claire Valdez in the Seventh District; Democratic Georgia state Rep. Dr. Jasmine Clark, who won more than 81 percent of the vote to represent Georgia’s 13th District; Democrat Melat Kiros, who beat nearly 30-year incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette to represent Colorado’s First District; and Democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George, who will be Washington, D.C.’s first new mayor in more than a decade. As of shortly before midnight Eastern time, two other supporters of Medicare for All, Democratic Senate candidates Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Troy Jackson in Maine were both favored to win. 

Other candidates who want to address America’s inadequate health care system won on different ideas about how to do it, including Dr. Amy Acton, who beat billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio to become the first woman doctor to serve as governor in the nation’s history; South Carolina Democrat Dr. Annie Andrews, who beat Lindsey Graham’s unqualified sister to become the first woman doctor ever elected to the U.S. Senate; Democrat Jon Ossoff, who beat Republican incumbent Mike Collins to represent Georgia in the U.S. Senate; and Democrat James Talarico, who defeated corrupt Republican Ken Paxton to represent Texas in the U.S. Senate.  

Many of the victors were beneficiaries of support from the 314 Action Fund, a political action committee that recruits, trains, and endorses Democratic candidates with backgrounds in medicine and other scientific disciplines. (While in 2024 the fund was criticized for being a pass-through for AIPAC money in one congressional race in Oregon, it insisted that none of that took place this cycle.)

The PAC spent a total of $30 million in the midterms, the most in its history, including $23.6 million in candidates across the primary and general elections and nearly $7 million bundled directly to campaigns. It backed more than 500 doctors, nurses, and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals as candidates, including 13 in battleground districts, such as emergency room physician Dr. Amish Shah in Arizona’s First District, who was expected to win even though Elon Musk tried to buy the seat for Donald Trump’s golfing friend Jay Feely, whose experience in public life was that he was once a kicker in the NFL. 

“It’s been 50 years since there was a Democrat in the Senate who was a doctor,” said 314 Action Executive Director Erik Polyak, referring to Sen. Ernest Gruening (D-AK), the last Democratic medical doctor to serve in the chamber, who left in 1969. That has now changed with Andrews’s victory in South Carolina. Polyak added that the candidates 314 backs agree that women have a right to choose and that vaccines are safe. “There’s never been a pro-choice doctor in the Senate,” he said, “if you can believe it.”  

There are multiple Republican doctors, however, including ob/gyn doctor Sen. Roger Marshall, who sued hundreds of his own patients and profiteered off the destruction of rural health, as the Prospect reported. Marshall and other GOP doctors object to a woman’s right to reproductive health care.

“That is totally fucked up,” Polyak said. “How do they advocate for their patients?”  

The victories came just 72 hours after the federal government published its 2027 rates for Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, insurance on the exchanges, which went up by an average of 13 percent. That’s the second-highest rate increase in ACA history; the highest rates were in 2026, when the average cost increased by 26 percent. 

That increase is thanks to higher costs throughout the system, but for families it’s been massively exacerbated by Trump’s decision to allow enhanced subsidies for Obamacare to expire. 

Speaking with the Prospect as she was canvassing up to the last minute in Las Vegas, Maria Liliana Deniz, a guest room attendant and Culinary Union member, said families are buckling under the weight of that cost. Young adults are no longer able to move into their own homes because doing so is too expensive. And even if they contribute to household expenses, it’s still hard for people to make ends meet. The costs of rent, health care, food, and gas are making life unaffordable. 

“They’re thinking, are they going to pay their rent?” said Liliana Deniz. “Or are they going to buy their medicines?” 

Trump also used his One Big Beautiful Bill Act to rip more than $1 trillion out of the American health care system, primarily through cuts to Medicaid. This has already kicked hundreds of thousands of people off their insurance and will lead to about ten million more uninsured people over the next eight years. The looming Medicaid cuts, most of which kick in next year, forced 646 hospitals to close wards, end services, or close down entirely, and have put another 628 hospitals at risk of doing so, according to a tracker maintained by the nonprofit Protect Our Care.  

Health care in the United States has never been perfect, Brad Woodhouse, president of Protect Our Care, told the Prospect before the polls closed yesterday. But Trump’s destruction has made it so much worse. He noted that Republicans attempted to crush the Affordable Care Act in 2017 and failed. Now, he said, “they chased the car, they caught it, and tonight they’re going to get run over by it. Health care is the number one affordability issue.” 

Unfortunately, he said, even once new Democrats get to D.C., it will take significant time to fix what Trump wrecked. Lawmakers could restore the money Trump allocated to tax breaks and forever wars. They could reverse the work requirements that are scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2027. But not every shuttered hospital will be able to reopen. “Some of the damage will be impossible to fix,” he said, so Democratic lawmakers will have to come up with new solutions. He also cautioned that Trump could spend his last two years in office undermining everything Democrats attempt. 

“If things don’t get fixed immediately or don’t get fixed as fast as they want, look at Republicans,” he said. “Be patient and hold Republicans accountable for continuing to sabotage American health care.”