×
The Wall Street Journal thinks so:
It turns out there's a good reason Hillary Clinton went on and on about health care in all those Democratic debates.Sen. Clinton's stunning comeback Tuesday suggests that health care did much to fuel her revival -- and, not coincidentally, is helping open up a broader socioeconomic divide among Democratic voters.In winning this week's primaries in Ohio and Texas, Sen. Clinton thumped Barack Obama among voters who consider health care the most important issue in deciding on a candidate, as she has in other states. In Texas, for example, while the two candidates were nearly neck and neck overall, exit polls show that she won 58% to 39% among voters who put health care atop their priority list. In Ohio, she won among such voters by 56% to 42%.Taken alone, these voters focused on health care are a significant slice of the Democratic electorate. In state after state, they have tended to make up a fifth to a quarter of those voting in Democratic primaries.But they represent more than that: They are a connection to the broader universe of blue-collar and down-scale Democratic voters who provided Sen. Clinton her biggest boost Tuesday. Lower-income voters are more worried about finding health care than anybody else, and they are the ones who now form the core of the Clinton constituency.Again, the numbers prove the point. Among Ohio voters who said health care was their top concern, almost half said they had family incomes below $50,000. And Sen. Clinton won convincingly among these lower-income voters; she beat Sen. Obama among them 56% to 42%.In part, various things are getting conflated here. Clinton is strong among low income whites, and health care is important to low income whites. Her strength among them, however, may be independent of her position on health care. So there's a question of causality.That said, she's been pounding Obama on the issue pretty hard even though the conventional wisdom is that his position is politically stronger (while hers is substantively better). He in turn, has been slamming her even more relentlessly, including with mailers that show two downscale white who look like Harry and Louise sitting around lamenting her big government coercion. Presumably, both campaigns are polling their arguments on this, and Obama is finding support for his fearmongering about affordability, and she's finding backing for her attacks on his inattention to universality (she sent out mailers with pictures of seven Americans, and asked which he would allow to remain uninsured). What these numbers suggest, then, is that his attacks are proving less effective than many assumed, and that her position may, at least in the short-term, be the political winner.
