Michael Parent gets instructions on submitting his ballot while voting Tuesday in Portland, Maine. (Robert F. Bukaty/AP)
Less than two months after Republicans’ latest effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act imploded, a purple state just made a decidedly blue-state move to essentially expand Obamacare.
On Tuesday, Maine became the first state to expand Medicaid with a ballot initiative. And it passed overwhelmingly: Maine voters agreed to grant health care to an estimated 70,000 low-income residents by a nearly 20-percentage point margin by the time the measure was called by election watchers. In other words, a sizable number of voters in Maine just voted to do the exact opposite of what the state’s Republican governor and Republicans in Washington have been trying to do.
Maine Gov. Paul LePage vetoed a bipartisan legislative deal to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act at least five times. Since Republicans took control of Washington in January, they’ve spent more than half the year trying to repeal Obamacare with proposals that would have drastically cut Medicaid. But Maine’s Sen. Susan Collins (R) was one of the defining “no” votes that ultimately ended the GOP efforts, saying the plans would pull the rug out from too many in her state.
What happened in Maine could provide momentum for progressives to get voters in other states to expand Medicaid, such as Alaska and Idaho, where groups have already started similar Medicaid expansion ballot initiatives next year.
“This will send a clear signal to where the rest of the country is on health care,” said Jonathan Schleifer, executive director of the Fairness Project, which helped put together the ballot initiative. As Republicans have tried to roll back Obamacare, public support for an active government role in health care has spiked.
Schleifer said his group has spent the past year in Maine — and some $2 million — laying the groundwork for this. After Trump won the election and Republicans held on to Congress, they went to their tried-and-true method of ballot initiatives to try to fight back.
“Looking at what progressives were able to accomplish by ballot initiatives in 2016, we asked ourselves what do we do for biggest challenge out there, which is the threat to Affordable Care Act,” Schleifer said. “We asked ourselves: What can we do to not just hold the line but to advance things?”
Schleifer is right. The left has had spectacular success over the past four years going around Republican legislatures to change state policy on everything from guns and minimum wage with ballot initiatives. In fact, when put to the voters over the past 20 years, minimum wage increases have rarely lost.
Last November was no different. Voters in four out of four states resoundingly approved minimum wage hikes in 2016. (The last time Congress approved a minimum wage hike, George W. Bush was president.) In Arizona, the vote for a high minimum wage outperformed Trump by 10 percentage points. Voters in eight of nine states also voted to ease restrictions on marijuana, and three of four states voted to put in place gun restrictions.
[Winners and losers of the biggest state political battles of the year]
Ballot initiatives are an important tool for progressives in the Trump era, just like how conservatives used them in the ’90s when Democrats dominated government. Other national groups descended on Maine to help this pass. Planned Parenthood’s Maine political group said they knocked on over 8,600 doors in Portland over the last week of the election.
Not all progressive ballot advocates are as bullish on Maine’s ballot initiative to change the health-care landscape.
Kellie Dupree with the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which helps progressive groups strategize ballot initiatives, said expanding Medicaid can be a tough sell as it requires taxpayer money.
“We’ll wait to see how these policies shape up,” she said.
Most of Democrats’ reasons to celebrate this past year has been the absence of legislation. So at the very least, expanding Medicaid in a state like Maine is a notable change of pace for a party largely locked out of power.
