Politics
Democrats are united in bashing GOP on Obamacare. Medicare for All could reopen a rift.
Progressives are pushing Medicare for All in some of the Democratic Party’s most competitive Senate primaries next year, threatening the unity the party has found on attacking Republicans over expiring Obamacare subsidies.
In Maine, Graham Platner said he’s making Medicare for All a “core part” of his platform in his race against Gov. Janet Mills, the establishment pick who’s called for a universal health care program. In Illinois, Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton and Rep. Robin Kelly are both championing the concept — and calling out rival Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi for not fully embracing it.
In Minnesota, Medicare for All has emerged as a key distinction between progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and moderate Rep. Angie Craig, who supports adding a public option to the Affordable Care Act rather than Medicare for All. Flanagan said she “absolutely” expects the policy to define the primary because “it doesn’t matter if I’m in the urban core, the suburbs or greater Minnesota — when I say I’m a supporter of Medicare for All, the room erupts.”
And it’s become a flashpoint in Michigan, where physician Abdul El-Sayed, who wrote a book called Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide, is using his signature issue to draw a contrast with Rep. Haley Stevens and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who favor other approaches.
Medicare for All — government-funded health coverage for every American — is “where we need to point to,” El-Sayed said in an interview. “And I think you can galvanize a winning coalition around this issue.”
But some more moderate Democrats worry that progressives’ renewed push for Medicare for All would undermine the party’s recent united front in fighting for an extension of the Obamacare subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year, leading to a significant spike in insurance costs for millions of Americans. Their effort initially failed in the Senate, but with the help of four vulnerable Republicans who crossed party lines this week, Democrats have now secured a House vote on an extension in January.
“We have a singular message, which is: ‘Don’t let these tax credits go.’ We have Republicans on the ropes,” said a national Democratic strategist who works on Senate races and was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “I don’t think introducing ‘we need MFA’ is the right strategy right now. I think it would be unhelpful.”
Several Democratic consultants pointed to recent public polling showing Americans like having individual insurance coverage, despite being dissatisfied with health care companies. An NBC News poll found 82 percent of Americans were satisfied with their plans, both private and government-sponsored. Based on that data, these consultants said allowing Americans to buy into a government-offered plan, known as a “public option,” is more politically palatable.
Centrists have long dismissed Medicare for All as both a policy pipedream and political albatross for their party — a rallying cry for the left that serves as catnip for Republican admakers looking to broad brush Democrats as socialists. They argue that surveys often fail to present voters with the full picture of how Medicare for All would work, and therefore fail to capture its electoral toxicity.
“What we need to accept is there’s a deeply held skepticism among Americans about going zero to 60 that’s entirely government run, even though they don’t love the current system,” said Adam Jentleson, a Democratic strategist and president of the Searchlight Institute. “In isolation, this thing does okay. But it’s not how it plays out in real life, and the totality will crush us.”
The once-fringe policy that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) mainstreamed during his presidential campaigns has become a rallying cry for his favored candidates and other progressives across battleground primaries, as Democrats work to make health care costs central to next year’s midterms and as the party base clamors for fighters willing to disrupt the status quo. The push for Medicare for All, which receded during the more moderate Biden era, comes as Democrats have otherwise been unified on their health care messaging, forcing Republicans onto defense over their refusal to extend expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies.
“Do I think every single swing-seat candidate is going to come out for Medicare for All? No,” said Jess Morales Rocketto, a Democratic strategist and board member for the nonprofit Care in Action. “But if you want to signal that you’re unafraid and bold right now, and you want to say you’re not beholden to the status quo, it’s a perfect position for that.”
Progressives are emboldened by partisan and independent polling that shows most Democrats and a majority of independents support Medicare for All. A recent survey commissioned by Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s (D-Wash.) leadership PAC and first reported by Blue Light News showed 90 percent of Democrats back Medicare for All and found most independents and one in five Republicans back a “government-provided system.”
Jayapal, the former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, plans to push her colleagues to start promoting Medicare for All again in the new year. She predicted in an interview that support for the system will be a “defining factor” in the party’s primaries next year and an electoral winner in battleground House seats.
But proponents of Medicare for All argue that a government-provided system would lessen the pinch of rising health care costs. They say pushing to extend the ACA subsidies and promoting Medicare for All as an end goal are not mutually exclusive. And they point to several 2018 candidates who won tough seats while supporting the measure, including former Rep. Katie Porter in California to retiring Rep. Jared Golden of Maine.
“You can know that there are short-term stopgaps that must be taken to protect working people while also thinking that long term, we need a better system,” said Platner, who is vying against Mills to unseat GOP Sen. Susan Collins in Maine.
Platner has been extolling Medicare for All from the start of his campaign and said it gets the “most raucous” response at his events across Maine, where a recent Pan Atlantic Research poll found 63 percent support for the system (and Platner trailing Mills by 10 points).
He argued in an interview that Mills isn’t as steadfast in her support for the concept because she “doesn’t talk about it all that often” and uses “vague language” when she does. Mills has said “it is time” for universal health care and that she’s “committed to finding a way to get there” if elected. Her campaign echoed that sentiment in response to a request for comment for this story, and cited her efforts to expand Mainers access to Medicaid.
In Minnesota, Flanagan said embracing Medicare for All has been a “journey” during her Senate campaign, as she heard from Minnesotans that the “cost of health care is the thing that comes over and over and over again.” Of Craig’s support for a public option, Flanagan said voters don’t want a nominee who “nibbles around the edges” instead of being “bold and audacious.”
Craig calls the public option a “big, bold reform,” but emphasizes that it’s a policy “we could actually accomplish in this country in a fairly short time period,” she said in a video this week.
In Illinois, Stratton and Kelly, two of the three leading Democrats vying to replace retiring Sen. Dick Durbin, are jockeying for position as Medicare for All’s biggest champion in the race while their campaigns knock Krishnamoorthi for couching his support for the system. Krishnamoorthi said in a statement that while it’s “a noble goal, and I’m fighting to get us to universal coverage” his focus is on extending the ACA subsidies and reversing Republicans’ cuts to Medicaid.
And in Michigan, El-Sayed has slammed McMorrow’s call for universal health care with a public option as “incoherent” and ill-informed as the two compete for the same slice of progressive voters. McMorrow has knocked the idea of a single-payer system run by President Donald Trump and his controversial health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And she’s promoted a public option so people who like their private insurance can keep it. Stevens’ campaign says she supports strengthening Obamacare, including through a public option, without endorsing Medicare for All.
The issue is also becoming a flashpoint in Democratic primaries for some of the most competitive House seats in the country, driven in part by Sanders-backed candidates running from California’s Central Valley to Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley.
“There’s immense hostility and anger toward the way the insurance industry functions, doubled up with health care itself being one of the biggest affordability issues,” said Mark Longabaugh, a progressive strategist who worked on Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid. “Progressives are smart to push the case.”
Politics
Young men are swinging away hard from Republicans, pessimistic about economy, new poll finds
Republicans’ 2024 gains among young men have evaporated — and that could have instant ramifications this November, according to a new Cygnal poll.
President Donald Trump narrowly carried young men in 2024, according to exit polls, a big swing toward the GOP from past elections. But Democrats’ generic ballot lead among male likely voters ages 18-30 now sits at 57%-40%, according to the new survey.
Trump’s favorability is underwater at just 38%-55%, and Republicans’ net favorability among the demographic now sits at -9 points, with 40% viewing the party favorably and 49% unfavorably.
One silver lining for the GOP: Among all registered voters sampled, including those least likely to turn out in November, the Democratic generic ballot lead is much smaller, 44% to 41%.
“It is not a very good electorate, if you’re the Republican Party, among the people who are the most determined to vote,” said Alex Tarascio, pollster and principal at Cygnal, in an interview with Blue Light News ahead of the poll’s release during Thursday’s Symposium on Young American Men.
Young men alone likely won’t determine control of Congress; they make up a fraction of the electorate, and they are less likely to vote than women of the same age or their older counterparts. But that lack of enthusiasm itself is a warning sign for Republicans, who will need to motivate their base ahead of November if they wish to maintain control of Congress.
The young men sampled are overwhelmingly concerned about cost-of-living issues — the same reason that many swung toward the GOP two years ago.
When given a list of options and asked which will matter most in determining their vote in November, a wide plurality — 29% — selected “inflation and the cost of living,” and another 14% chose “housing costs and being able to afford a place to live.” When asked what policies would make the biggest difference in their lives, the top answers again deal with the economy: The most-selected options were lowering the cost of goods, lowering housing costs and cutting taxes.
Many young men feel pessimistic about their ability to achieve success. When asked if they feel the rules in this country are set up to work for or against young men, 43% said they feel the rules are set up against them to 47% who said the rules are set up in their favor.
That pessimism bleeds into how they view other institutions. Both the Democratic Party (-1) and Republican Party (-9) have net-negative favorability among the demographic, and the White House’s current occupants are even more unpopular: Vice President JD Vance sits at 37% favorability with -10 net favorability, while Trump is at 38% favorability with -17 net.
“Young men are pretty down on institutions and political figures, and this one isn’t any exception to that,” Tarascio said.
Republicans successfully targeted young men and low-propensity voters in 2024 to help propel them to victory largely in part by having Trump sit for interviews with podcast hosts and influencers popular with young men. Trump has yet to return to those forums en masse ahead of the midterms, but he’s repeatedly told voters to pretend as if he’s on the ballot in November.
But Trump may no longer be the motivator he once was for turning out young, male, low-propensity voters. Among those surveyed who were least likely to vote, Trump’s net favorability is -22, lower than the respondents most likely to vote, where his net favorability is -19.
“If Trump gets in front of them, I don’t think it’s a bad bet, but for some of these people it could backfire,” Tarascio said.
The poll was conducted Sept. 15-18 with a sample of 800 registered male voters ages 18-30. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.46 percentage points.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee is shifting its focus away from the North Carolina and Georgia Senate races as it works to shore up red states like Texas and flip other Democratic-held seats.
In a closed-door meeting Wednesday, Sen. Tim Scott, the chair of the NRSC, told Senate Republicans that the campaign arm will focus its spending going forward on defending GOP seats in Maine, Alaska, Ohio, Iowa and Texas and trying to flip the Democratic-held seats of Michigan and New Hampshire, according to four people in the room who were granted anonymity to share private details.
That list notably leaves out North Carolina GOP nominee Michael Whatley’s battle against Democrat Roy Cooper and Georgia GOP nominee Mike Collins’ effort to unseat Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff.
Scott’s briefing is the clearest sign yet that Republicans have deprioritized the two states, as POLITICO has reported, while senior Republicans grow increasingly resigned to the possibility of losing those races. It’s a remarkable shift: President Donald Trump carried Georgia twice in 2016 and 2024 and North Carolina over the last three presidential elections.
In deprioritizing North Carolina, the NRSC is effectively ceding a state that Democrats haven’t won in the Senate since 2008.
Still, other GOP groups with massive war chests, including Trump’s MAGA Inc., could pick up the slack.
Scott also shared with the senators polling showing Republicans are locked in tight battles in several other key races, which tracks with much of the public polling, according to the four people.
For example, one poll found that GOP Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio is still trailing former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. Scott also showed polling indicating Republican John Sununu is essentially neck-and-neck with Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas in New Hampshire, a seat Republicans are laser-focused on trying to flip.
NRSC did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Collins’ campaign.
“As Roy Cooper said earlier this year about U.S. Senate races in North Carolina, ‘Democrats are often ahead until they are not.’ And then just last week Cooper, correctly, observed, ‘We know a lot of undecided voters lean Republican.’ We’re confident we will have the resources to get our message out to North Carolina voters and win,” said Whatley Spokesman DJ Griffin in a statement.
Georgia GOP party chair Josh McKoon dismissed the notion that his state was being deprioritized by Republicans in Washington, even as he acknowledged beating Ossoff will be a challenge.
“Every cycle, someone in Washington leaks that they’re thinking about moving money,” he said in a text message. “What matters is who shows up — and what the actual numbers say.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune is set to headline a fundraiser for Collins in Atlanta on Thursday, alongside the state’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp. The Collins campaign is also making the case that one in 10 Georgia voters — who backed Trump in 2024 and plan to vote for Jackson — are still “up for grabs,” according to a memo obtained by POLITICO.
“The goal in Georgia is to strike a balance where you are spending as little for Senate as possible while not derailing Rick Jackson’s, so far, very strong bid for Governor in a difficult environment,” said a GOP pollster granted anonymity to speak candidly about the landscape. Public polling shows the governor’s race has much tighter margins, with Jackson leading Democratic nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms in some recent surveys.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who lost his Senate primary to Trump-backed Ken Paxton, was also in the room. He later told Blue Light News that the party has to make tough decisions.
“At some point I think the people spending that money are going to have to make hard choices and figure out where the money can have the biggest impact, and certainly Texas is the most expensive,” Cornyn said.
Q THE LANDSLIDE: Quinnipiac University released a poll today that found Gov. Kathy Hochul leading Republican Bruce Blakeman 58-39 — putting her on track for the fourth-largest landslide by a New York gubernatorial candidate in the past 200 years.
It’s by far the best poll for Hochul this year and certainly better than a Siena University survey out this morning that found her with a modest 9 point lead over the Nassau County executive.
So which one’s closer to reality?
The last time both pollsters released New York numbers on the same day was a few weeks before Hochul’s last election in 2022. Siena found at the time that her lead over then-Rep. Lee Zeldin was quickly shrinking, having dropped from 17 to 11 points.
The Q Poll painted a more dire picture for the governor.
“We released a poll in mid-October showing that Hochul had a 4 point lead over Lee Zeldin,” Quinnipiac spokesperson Mary Snow said. “And it went against the grain of other polls out there at the time.”
Hochul wound up winning that race by about 6 points.
Pollster vs. pollster results in prior elections have been mixed. Both Q and Siena nailed Andrew Cuomo’s eventual 23 point margin of victory in October 2018 polls, though Siena’s early November numbers that year found Cuomo’s lead had shrunk to 13. An infamous Q Poll from September 2010 found Cuomo with a stunningly small 6 point lead over Buffalo firebrand Carl Paladino, while a Siena poll the next day found a much more predictive 57-24 Cuomo advantage.
The biggest difference this time around is that Quinnipiac assumed a higher share of November’s turnout will be in deep blue New York City.
The five boroughs accounted for 31 percent of the statewide turnout in 2022 and 34 percent in 2018. Siena’s sample assumed 30 percent of this year’s voters will come from there, while 38 percent of Quinnipiac’s sample was from the city.
Quinnipiac also does more to avoid undecided voters. “One tweak that we made after 2020 was an adjustment to the questions that we ask, so that we try to cut down on the number of people who say they don’t know,” Snow said.
Only 3 percent of the Q Poll’s sample declined to weigh in on the Hochul-Blakeman race, while the comparable number was 9 percent in Siena’s poll. And it appears as if a lot of the Quinnipiac respondents who might not have answered Siena’s questions broke toward the incumbent: Siena has Hochul winning New York City 61-27 while Quinnipiac has her up 70-27; Siena had her up 57-34 among women while Quinnipiac found her lead at 63-34.
Another notable difference between the methodologies that may account for the divergent results is that Quinnipiac’s sample was based on asking respondents what party they affiliate with. Siena uses voter registration files.
“For a couple of years running, the New York Times/Siena Poll was ranked as the most accurate poll in America,” Siena spokesperson Steve Greenberg said. “Siena has been polling New York state for nearly a quarter of a century, and we have shown that we get it right almost all of the time.”
Republicans, for their part, believe both sets of numbers are far overstating Hochul’s advantage.
“Blakeman is closer in the polls I’ve seen than Lee Zeldin was at this moment in time four years ago,” state Senate Republican Campaign Committee Chair George Borrello said. “As I travel around New York state, I have seen literally thousands of Bruce Blakeman signs. Yet I can count on one hand the number of Kathy Hochul signs I’ve seen, unless you count the ones that say ‘Fire Hochul.’” — Bill Mahoney
From the Capitol
MEGAWATT DEAL: New York has made its first awards for large-scale batteries under a new program and secured contracts for new renewables that are close to getting built.
The state’s energy authority contracted for 719 megawatts from 13 solar, wind and hydroelectric projects and 950 megawatts of battery storage from eight projects.
NYSERDA President and CEO Doreen Harris announced the awards Wednesday during a Climate Week event hosted by the state’s renewable developers association.
“Everything that we do with respect to our energy system costs money,” Harris said. “When we invest in clean energy, not only are we talking about low single-digit percentage increases in cost, we are talking about benefits that far exceed those costs.”
Hochul warned that federal headwinds and rising expenses made a more ambitious pace of transitioning to clean energy too costly as she successfully fought to weaken New York’s ambitious climate law earlier this year. But she has highlighted her continued support for progress on offshore wind, renewables, storage and nuclear this week.
New York and developers are racing the expiration of federal tax credits. Renewables that didn’t start construction by July 4 — or don’t finish work by the end of the year if they start after that deadline — won’t be eligible for those key incentives that lower the cost of contracts for the state.
Read more from Blue Light News Pro’s Marie J. French here.
FROM CITY HALL
MAKING ROOM: Bellevue Hospital announced a major renovation and expansion of its inpatient psychiatric wing, fueled by an infusion of $26.5 million from the City Council.
Bellevue, which is part of the NYC Health + Hospitals system, will use the new capital funding to add 40 beds for adult psychiatric patients over the next few years — bringing the division’s total capacity to 204 beds.
Hospital officials said the expansion will ease the bottleneck of patients with severe mental illnesses who need to be admitted for continued observation and treatment; those inpatient psychiatric units have been operating consistently at 98% capacity.
“The need here demanded an investment of this scale,” Council member Virginia Maloney, who spearheaded the funding, said during a news conference in the hospital’s atrium.
Bellevue Hospital CEO Eric Wei said the facility has seen a bump in psychiatric patients since the April 2025 closure of Mount Sinai Beth Israel several blocks away. Bellevue’s dedicated ER for psychiatric patients, which Wei said sees about 30 patients daily, is undergoing its own $40 million expansion.
“We are unfortunately needing to transfer out about 90 patients a month to other inpatient units because there’s no room in our inpatient psychiatric units,” Wei said in an interview. “We’re always feeling like I’m toeing the line. We’re very busy.”
Bellevue was so overwhelmed as of late that hospital officials asked FDNY to stop bringing them patients with psychiatric emergencies, according to EMS union Local 2507. Those diversion requests continued for at least a couple weeks in late August and early September, a union spokesperson said. — Maya Kaufman
IN OTHER NEWS
— INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE: A NYC high school which once enrolled 3,000 students now has only 90. (The City Reporter)
— FIRST IN THE NATION: In a new TV ad, Hochul is touting her first-in-the-nation data center moratorium. (City & State)
— HITTING THE BRAKES: The rollout of electric school buses in New York state has been rocky. (The New York Times)
Missed this morning’s New York Playbook? We forgive you. Read it here.
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