Well, that sucked.

I'll have much more to say about the impact of yesterday's disastrous election on the ACA and healthcare coverage in general tomorrow, but for the moment let me just note something about the GOTV effort here in Michigan, which was focused on getting about 900,000 Democrats who showed up in 2008 & 2012 but not in 2010. Here's how that worked out:

Michigan Votes for Governor, 2010:
Snyder: 1,874,834 / Bernero: 1,287,320 / 3,226,088

Michigan Votes for Governor, 2014:
Snyder: 1,605,405 / Schauer: 1,477,300 / Total: 3,152,616

Schauer actually did receive over 190,000 more votes than Virg Bernero did 4 years ago (about 15% higher), and Snyder's vote tally was down about 270,000 from 2010 (about 14% lower)...but it wasn't nearly enough. Schauer still lost by about 130,000 votes.

It's not the fact that Mark Schauer lost in and of itself that's so depressing here (it was expected to be a nail-biter), it's the fact that overall turnout in Michigan was actually down by about 70,000 votes. The 2014 numbers aren't final yet; presumably the official total will be a few thousand higher in a few days, and may even end up pretty much identical, but even so...

(sigh) Anyway, I'll leave it there for now. No more posts for today; I'm too depressed, and all anyone will be talking about today is the bloodbath anyway, so I'm gonna focus on my day job today.

I'll have a major post regarding QHP attrition tomorrow, however.

And with that, I hereby promise that future blog entries will only discuss the election results in the context of their impact on the ACA (which could be a bit more substantial than many had previously thought).