Democrats Worry A Lot About Policies That Win Elections. That's Short-Sighted.

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

61% : On this, the Affordable Care Act is instructive.
59% : Although controversial when they were first enacted, social programs like Social Security and Medicare are classic examples of this phenomenon; they've become so popular and entrenched in our politics that parties perpetually campaign to protect and strengthen them.
52% : This would also have been true of free college tuition for community college, another program Democrats contemplated but did not include in the latest round of negotiations.
50% : Additionally, because the Affordable Care Act, with its health exchanges and subsidies and limited sign-up windows, is very complicated, Democrats had a hard time explaining its benefits, while Republicans had an easy time attacking it.
49% : As the most consequential expansion of the social safety net in the 21st century (thus far), it did reshape our politics, but its complicated design and highly partisan implementation mostly just reinforced existing political divides, making it harder for new voter constituencies to emerge.

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