No, this is a second mid-term they knew it was going to be good for the GOP if Obie won re-election. The best they could hope to get out of OC for this cycle was that the just enough of it would be turning on for good PR, but even that wasn’t going to be a big gain because nothing really major is going into place. The big thing was to “phase in” the uninsured tax so nobody would face any taxes until after the election.
There was never a chance for it being a winning issue, if they thought it would be it would have gone into effect during the 2012 election cycle so Obie could hang his hat on his accomplishments. And its failure really won’t help the single payer movement, because it’ll be a failure of government run healthcare.
You missed the point of my original post above. There was a chance for it as a winning issue because they meant to pin the problems on corporate America against the average citizen... and hang that around the neck of the GOP like a flaming tire ("necklacing").
I never said the program itself would succeed. In fact, it was meant to fail. In failure, if they successfully blamed corporate America, they could ride in as savior with single-payer. This was never meant to be anything but a vehicle to single-payer. This is where they failed, though. It is clear that the fault in the healthcare system is the law itself, not corporate America.