“I’ve never seen anything like this": progressives see huge donation spike after AHCA vote

House Republicans successfully sent Speaker Paul Ryan’s American Health Care Act to the Senate on Thursday, revealing the extent of their determination to dismantle Obamacare in the face of massive obstacles.

But in doing so, Republicans also set off a chain reaction of outrage on the other side — reinvigorating a left whose energy had recently flagged, and again demonstrating that defending Obamacare has become the central rallying cry in the post-election resurgence in activism among Democrats.

“I’ve never seen anything like this. Not remotely,” said David Nir, political director for the liberal fundraising/blog platform Daily Kos, about his organization smashing single-day fundraising records on Thursday amid the AHCA health vote.

Several issues animate the Democratic base right now. Liberals are furious over President Donald Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns. They have many questions about his campaign’s ties to Russia. And thousands of protesters spontaneously erupted in mass demonstrations at airports throughout the country after his “Muslim ban” was announced in late January.

But for the first four months of Trump’s administration, one issue above all others has proven the real catalyst fueling the left-wing anti-Trump resistance movement: health care.

It’s not just for fundraising that the health care wars have played the central role in invigorating Democrats. The evidence is also overwhelming that the AHCA unifies the Democratic Party’s feuding factions, spurs new candidates and volunteers to enter the political fray, and — perhaps most importantly — tanks the popularity of the Republican Party nationwide.

“There isn’t a Republican that votes for this who won’t be haunted in the days ahead,” House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said in an interview Thursday morning.

House Republicans face a surge of protests back home

The first and most visible way House Republicans will feel the blowback is through a planned onslaught of protests, demonstrations, and town halls to attack them for backing Ryan’s bill.

The planning began before the bill had even passed. Planned Parenthood and MoveOn.org expected to hold 15 separate demonstrations at the offices of congressional Republicans on Friday alone — including those of two senators (Arizona’s Jeff Flake and John McCain).

John Leo, 27, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, joined about 80 people in a demonstration at the Carmel, Indiana, offices of Republican Rep. Susan Brooks. Brooks voted for the bill.

"I basically said to her deputy chief of staff that people would die as a result of this, including people she was meeting today," Leo said.

The left-wing resistance group Indivisible has planned six additional “die-ins” at House Republicans’ offices, where opponents of the bill will lie on the floor to demonstrate their opposition to the bill. That number is expected to rise, even though only seven of the 217 Republicans who voted for the bill are hosting town halls this upcoming recess, according to a tally on Thursday by the Washington Post’s David Weigel.

"This has been our key focus. Our team had 14 district events for moderate Republicans in the two weeks leading up to the vote," said Sarah Dohl, a spokesperson for Indivisible.

"Trumpcare touches every single person in this country, and it's been an issue everyone can get and mobilize behind. It's been the unifying issue for the resistance.”

As Republicans embrace AHCA, House Democratic candidates seize an opening

Photo by William Campbell/Corbis via Getty Images

But if the protests mark the first level of resistance to the bill, activists recognize that it could prove meaningless without channeling it into votes that throw Republican officeholders out of office.

Their best upcoming chance to do so is through banjo-playing Democrat Rob Quist, 69, who faces an uphill battle in his race to win the special election for Montana’s House seat on May 25. The state went to Trump by more than 20 points in November 2016, and Democrats haven’t held the seat since 1992.

But Quist has increasingly seized on health care as a political winner in his state, where Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion has insured 70,000 people. Quist’s opponent, tech millionaire Greg Gianforte, declined to say on Thursday one way or another whether he supported the AHCA. (Unlike House Republicans, he cited the need for more information before making up his mind.)

Quist seized on the opening. “Today, the US House voted on a health care bill that would eliminate protections for Montanans with pre-existing conditions while giving a MASSIVE tax break to the super rich,” Quist’s campaign said in one of multiple statements on Thursday about the AHCA. “The bill also defunds Planned Parenthood, even though it provides hundreds of thousands of women with life-saving cancer screenings and preventative care.”

Nationally, the AHCA has polled abysmally from just after its conception. One Quinnipiac poll found that just 18 percent of voters approve it — making the Republican health bill less popular than almost any other bill or law in American politics.

At a local level, that unpopularity translates into a major political liability for House Republican candidates. In Georgia’s Sixth District, where Democrat Jon Ossoff is heading to a June runoff against Republican Karen Handel, Trump remains relatively popular — with an approval rating of 53 percent, according to the Washington Post.

Trump’s health care bill, by contrast, is massively unpopular in the district. A poll by Lake Research Partners found that voters in the Georgia Sixth oppose the AHCA by a 59-26 margin — and Ossoff is launching ads targeting his opponent over the bill. Similarly, Archie Parnell, a Democratic nominee for a House seat in deeply red South Carolina, is going after House Republicans for “taking healthcare from 24 million people.”

Political forecasters are beginning to take notice. The final estimates aren’t out yet, but Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report predicted Thursday that he’d have to update his expectations to give Democrats better odds of retaking the House.

Meanwhile, fears over losing health care is one of the biggest factors helping lead new candidates to seek office locally, said Carolyn Fiddler of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. Fiddler noted that for the first time ever, women comprise more than half of the candidates running against Republicans in the Virginia House of Delegates — a development partially due to a health bill that “presented an almost existential threat to them or to people they care about.”

Democrats ride an avalanche of new campaign cash unleashed by the AHCA

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Those candidates will get a big boost from the flood of cash that began sloshing through the Democratic Party fundraising accounts even before Ryan’s bill got the green light.

In about 24 hours, the political advocacy group Swing Left raised more than $800,000 for Democratic House candidates, with at least $100,000 going to challenge Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) alone. Daily Kos beat its single-day fundraising total by pulling in around $900,000 in just one day.

“When we first endorsed Ossoff, we raised $400,000 in the first week — and that totally blew us away,” said Nir, of Daily Kos. “That broke the all-time prior record of raising $400,000 for [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren over the course of an entire election cycle. In less than a day [over AHCA], we will raise more than we raised for in Ossoff in a week — which is more than we raised for Warren in a year.”

Celebrities got into the mix too. Musician John Legend directed his Twitter followers to donate to Democrats. George Takei of Star Trek fame followed suit. Overall, more than $4 million was donated to Democratic candidates through ActBlue on Thursday, according to a source with direct knowledge of the group’s fundraising haul.

Two dozen House Democrats who manage to get through a wild primary process — up to 1,000 Democrats have already declared their candidacy for office — can expect to start with a substantial war chest. The $900,000 raised by Daily Kos will go to House Democratic candidates running against 24 Republicans who voted for the AHCA and represent districts that Trump won by less than 50 percent of the vote. (Those Democratic candidates haven’t been chosen yet, so the money is being held in escrow and will then automatically go to the eventual nominees.)

MoveOn.org got into the action as well. A normal fundraising SMS alert for the progressive group results in $4,000 donations in total; the one it sent over the AHCA has raised $17,000 per hour since the vote, said Ben Wikler, Washington director of MoveOn, in an interview Thursday night. “People want to use every available channel to hold Republicans accountable, including their wallets,” he said.

A unifying issue for Democrats

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) did not mince words.

“There aren’t that many life-or-death votes in this place,” he said on the Capitol steps Thursday. “This is one of them. When you go into that chamber today, there is a green button and a red button. The individuals that press that green button are making a decision to kill thousands and thousands and thousands of Americans.”

“We have the ability to hold every single person in this building accountable who will vote for that monstrosity,” he said of the AHCA, before leading a chant of, “Vote them out! Vote them out! Vote them out!”

The anti-AHCA rally outside the Capitol on Thursday afternoon was small by the standards of the resistance, with only a few hundred people showing up. (Organizers argued that it was thrown together in less than a day and held during a workday.)

But it helped underscore the degree to which Democrats are confident that the AHCA is a political disaster for their opponents in addition to a moral one for their constituents. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) thundered against Ryan’s health care bill, her voice quivering with emotion. She was joined by a host of progressives — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Democrats on the Hill could barely contain their excitement over their brightening electoral fortunes from slipping into public view. After Ryan’s bill passed the House, they sang, “Hey, hey, hey, goodbye,” to taunt their Republican colleagues.

In a speech primarily blasting the AHCA’s impact on the American poor and middle class, Pelosi also referenced the political gains that could redound from the bill’s passage.

“Somebody said to me today, ‘Well, can’t you stop them?’ ... We want them to define themselves,” Pelosi said at the rally outside the Capitol. “Understand this: When they make this vote, anyone who contended that he or she is a moderate has crossed over the line.”

Pelosi’s comments drew some ire when shared on Twitter — with some critics arguing that she appeared to be gloating at a moment where upward of 24 million Americans stood to lose their health insurance.

But her point also reflected an undeniable reality, one well-documented in social science research. As Harvard political scientist Paul Pierson has found, stripping away government benefits turns out to be electoral suicide in country after country throughout the postwar world:

Frontal assaults on the welfare state carry tremendous electoral risks. ... Governments confronting the electoral imperatives of modern democracy will undertake retrenchment only when they discover ways to minimize the political costs involved. But as I emphasize, such techniques are hard to come by.

Everywhere, retrenchment is a difficult undertaking. The welfare state remains the most resilient aspect of the postwar political economy.

Republicans are currently trying to pull off one of the biggest welfare state retrenchments in American political history. And Democrats are coming for them.