An Obamacare Referendum?

The 2010 midterm elections were the initial referendum on lawmakers who voted for Obamacare: Democrats took a thumping. But two years later President Barack Obama proclaimed the debate over the law “settled" after he won a second term, treating his reelection as a judgment on his signature legislation. By the end of 2014, any legislator who supported the Affordable Care Act in Congress and sought reelection had faced the voters back home.

It's small wonder that the national conversation has adopted a new set of topics in 2016: immigration, trade, Hillary Clinton's email server, and Donald Trump's Twitter feed. Despite the GOP nominee's obligatory vow to repeal and replace the health care statute, neither major-party candidate has spent much time discussing it on the stump.

But that doesn't mean Obamacare isn't still being debated as a campaign issue. In Indiana, Republican representative Todd Young is running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Dan Coats; he's up against a ballot-box rarity—a lawmaker who voted for Obamacare who has yet to face the judgment of the voters: former senator Evan Bayh.

A moderate Democrat, Bayh had at first been skeptical of Obama's health reform bill, but he became a pivotal convert on the legislation's path to the president's desk. Bayh provided one of the critical Senate votes Democrats needed to thwart the bill's opponents in December 2009. Two months later, Bayh announced his intention to depart public office, saying that while "my passion for service to our fellow citizens is undiminished … my desire to do so by serving in Congress has waned." Time must have been restorative. Bayh was coaxed out of elective retirement earlier this year to replace a Democratic candidate who almost certainly would have lost.

Young is betting that Hoosiers haven't forgotten how Obamacare was passed and will give Bayh a taste of what he missed six Novembers ago. "They're seeking answers, and the answer is that Evan Bayh cast the deciding vote," Young says, describing his opponent the way national Republicans have described every Democratic senator who could've kept Obamacare from amassing 60 supporters in the upper chamber.