Trump Will Be Best Remembered As The Albatross Who Wrecked The GOP

Last week the malefactors who prop up the Koch network met in Manhattan for two days. They've gotten wind of the gigantic anti-Trump/anti-Ryan tsunami forming up in the hinterland and heading towards DC. And they are shitting a collective brick. Friday the Washington Post reported they "spoke in cataclysmic terms about the price they expect to pay in the midterm elections if their tax reform effort does not win passage. They voiced concerns a demoralized Republican base would stay home, financiers would stop writing campaign donation checks to incumbents and the congressional majorities the party has built in the House and Senate could evaporate overnight." Neo-fascist Texas Senator Ted Cruz was there warning about a 2018 "Watergate-level blowout." Some realized that the Republican Party civil war that has now blown completely out of control is adding gasoline to the fire of GOP inability to get anything done in Washington.

A good example was the Wall Street Journal reporting that Señor Trumpanzee urging "voters to oust lawmakers who don’t support his tax overhaul plan this year; he phoned his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, to offer encouragement after Mr. Bannon appeared on Fox News on Monday vowing to unseat sitting Republicans who don’t actively support the president’s agenda." Even an imbecile like Kushner-in-law phoned Bannon to encourage him after an appearance with Hannity that could have easily have beens scripted by Chuck Schumer. One of Bannon's lines was "There's a coalition coming together that is going to challenge every Republican incumbent except for Ted Cruz."

Mainstream conservatives are increasingly worried and now wondering not if a wave is coming, but how high it will be and how deep and long-lasting the damage the Trump Circus will cause. Friday the Nevada Independent, for example, reported how popular Republican Governor Brian Sandoval reacted to Trump's latest stumble with healthcare. Sandoval: "It’s going to hurt people. It’s going to hurt kids. It’s going to hurt families. It’s going to hurt individuals. It’s going to hurt people with mental health issues. It’s going to hurt veterans. It’s going to hurt everybody... [T]this is going to make it much more difficult for those people out in the rural counties and in the urban areas to be able to obtain affordable insurance. So this is something I don’t support, I think that this has been very good for Nevada, and I think the administration should keep providing those subsidies."

Last week New Yorker reporter Susan Glasser interviewed long-time swamp resident and GOP establishment figure, lobbyist Ed Rogers. "There’s fires all around" was how he greeted her before her first question, before she had even taken a seat. "It’s surreal... Why does it have to be this way?" She observed, aloud, that Republicans seem to be finding life under Trump a lot harder than Democrats; he agreed. "You want to be loyal," he said. "You want to be a good member of the team."

Rogers cited his partner Barbour’s dictum for surviving Washington under this volatile new President-- sometimes Trump’s gonna help, sometimes he’s gonna hurt-- before asking, “When is he going to help? Life is all about the net, not the gross. Where’s the help?” The confirmation of the Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, last spring, often cited as one of Trump’s major accomplishments, “seems like a long time ago,” Rogers said. “And is the totality of Trump still a net plus? Is it going to be a net plus?”

The weekend war of words between Corker and Trump had left Rogers, like many lobbyists in town, thinking not so much of the actual world war that Corker warned about (though he’s worried about that, too) but about the fate of Trump’s proposed tax-reform plan. Given Corker’s public skepticism about the proposal, Rogers and others now suspect that it may run into the same problems that blocked the repeal of Obamacare. “Is this what legislative momentum looks like?” he asked, before joking that perhaps “the flames and all are just a façade” and that, “behind it, Gary Cohn”-- the President’s chief economic adviser-- “is really doing magic and something big is coming together that is going to have fifty votes.”

...When I cited Corker’s comments that most Republicans at least privately shared the belief that the White House had been turned into an “adult day care” center for its capricious seventy-one-year-old chief resident, Rogers offered his own criticism of the White House.

A sampling:

“They’re grasping at straws.”

“There is a permanent hunkered-down quality.”

“It’s shocking, it’s embarrassing.”

“They’re just making it up every day as they go along.”

And yet, he hesitated when I asked whether Republicans agreed with Corker that Trump was dangerous. “I think the word ‘dangerous’ is still a rare word,” Rogers corrected me, saying that the words “reckless” and “destructive” were far more common. He went on, “Saying the D-word is different than believing there are now stewards of normalcy in [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions, in Tillerson, in Kelly, and others that, I think everybody acknowledges, are protecting institutions from Trump, and protecting Trump from Trump, for that matter.”

“The only thing that is reliable and dependable about Trump is that he’s unreliable and not dependable,” he added.

...Back in January, the conventional wisdom had been that Trump, a Washington novice with a clear disregard for the details, would leave the governing to Congress, making Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell perhaps the capital’s most important player. Now, Trump and McConnell are barely on speaking terms, and tensions within the Party are proliferating. “Of course it’s personal,” Eliot Cohen, a former Bush Administration official who organized his national-security colleagues to sign open letters against Trump during the primaries, said. “These are the kind of rifts that don’t heal.”

For Washington Republicans, Corker’s public chastising of Trump has only increased the pressure: Are you speaking out? And if not, why not? “I don’t think it’s responsible to hold back,” Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a veteran of both Bush Administrations, told me. “I don’t believe this is a time to hold back. A lot of people have gone along or stood there quiet when they disagreed. But not to weigh in when you actually do disagree seems to me wrong.”

It is now taken as axiomatic that the Washington wing of the G.O.P. loathes and fears Trump, but still, there are genuine differences of opinion about how to deal with him. As a Republican veteran of Capitol Hill explained to me, “The taxonomy of Washington Republicans is not a bright line of Never Trump versus pro-Trump.” There is, instead, “a continuum of people who are to varying degrees either outright supportive of the President or comfortable with the fact that getting things done requires working with the Administration to outright disgust and opposition.” As I have found, and with the exception of a small handful of officials who came to town with Trump, the private comments of even the most publicly pro-Trump Republicans often differ little from their more outspoken colleagues.

Elected Republican officials like Corker are in a somewhat different situation, given Trump’s continued popularity with the core G.O.P. electorate, and their need to face those voters back home. In terms of the ease with which Republicans in Congress can oppose Trump, “there is a hierarchy, in ascending order,” the Hill veteran said, with House “members and senators in cycle next year” at the bottom, followed by “senators who intend to run for reëlection but are not in cycle next year,” then “senators who will probably retire but have not yet announced,” and finally, at the top, “senators who have announced they will retire.” When Corker decided not to run for reëlection, last month, he likely did not change his mind about the President but simply “transitioned from category two to category five.”

...Trump, of course, ran against Washington, promising to “drain the Swamp,” so if the swamp decides to fight back, that’s not necessarily such a terrible thing for Trump. This may be why Steve Bannon is not pretending that Trump commands the respect and allegiance of Republicans inside the Beltway. “This is what they think about President Trump behind closed doors,” Bannon said on Fox News on Monday night, when asked about the Corker comments. Bannon is already turning the topic into a TV talking point, a rallying cry to the Trump base: See how horrible those swamp creatures are, how much they oppose Trump? By Wednesday, the intramural fight among Republicans was playing so well that Bannon was on television promising to mount primary challenges for every single Senate Republican incumbent (except Trump’s G.O.P. Presidential rival turned more or less faithful defender, Ted Cruz).

For lifers like Rogers, who’ve figured out how to survive and prosper no matter which party is in power, Washington means having a healthy appreciation for the fact that your team doesn’t always win. But now that it’s clearer that getting along in the traditional Washington sense is not part of Trump’s plan, Rogers said he has changed his view of what is possible in this Presidency. “Republican loyalists have gone from ‘gigantic things are going to happen; the world really is going to change; there’s going to be a fundamental shift in what the government does,’ . . . to, ‘Can we keep the lights on around here?’ ” He added, “The possibilities are getting narrower. Consequences are piling up.”

Most Beltway pundits and prognosticators aren't ready to take this to the next step yet-- a 2018 blowout. But CNBC's John Harwood is starting to get it. He wrote that while Señor Trumpanzee "takes a baseball bat to Obamacare and the Iran nuclear deal, odds are rising that he could break the Republican majority in Congress, too. Midterm elections remain just more than a year away. But a leading nonpartisan analyst now sees a slightly better than even chance that Democrats win back the House in November 2018, which would halt Trump's current legislative agenda and even jeopardize his ability to complete his term."



A friend who works at the DCCC smuggled me copy of one of the PPP memos for the DCCC's associated House Majority PAC poll, this one about 3 GOP held open seats. Enjoy:

A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that the tax plan proposed by Congressional Republicans is deeply unpopular, and Congressional seats in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Washington are looking to be quite competitive. Despite the fact that they are not running for re-election, the current Members of Congress should be open to persuasion on the Republican tax reform plan, especially if they are listening to their constituents who are not in favor of this plan and its provisions.

PA-15

In Pennsylvania’s 15th Congressional District, Congress has a 9% approval and 84% disapproval rating, and Speaker Paul Ryan has a 25% approval and 61% disapproval rating. President Trump is just as popular as he is unpopular (47/47), but a majority (53%) of his supporters oppose the provision in the tax plan that would give wealthy Americans a tax cut. The hypothetical election matchup between a Democratic candidate (44%) and a Republican candidate (43%) is quite close and indicates that this will be a very competitive race. Candidates should be aware that the tax plan proposed by Congressional Republicans is very unpopular in this district. Incumbent Republican Congressman Charlie Dent should also note that his constituents strongly oppose this plan and key components in it.

MI-11

In Michigan’s 11th Congressional District, President Trump, Congress, and Speaker Paul Ryan are all quite unpopular. Trump has a 44% approval rating and 50% say they disapprove of the job he is doing, while 10% of voters say they approve of the job Congress is doing and 80% say they disapprove. 22% approve of the job Speaker Ryan is doing and 65% disapprove. The hypothetical election matchup between a Democratic candidate and a Republican candidate is currently tied (42/42). Candidates should be aware that the tax plan proposed by Congressional Republicans is very unpopular in this district. Incumbent Republican Congressman David Trott should also note that his constituents strongly oppose this plan and key components in it.

WA-08

In Washington’s 8th Congressional District, President Trump, Congress, and Speaker Paul Ryan are all unpopular. Trump has a 40% approval rating and 55% say they disapprove of the job he is doing, while 12% of voters say they approve of the job Congress is doing and 79% say they disapprove. 20% approve of the job Speaker Ryan is doing and 67% disapprove. The hypothetical election matchup between Dino Rossi (42%) and a “Democratic candidate” (43%) is very close. Candidates should be aware that the tax plan proposed by Congressional Republicans is very unpopular in this district. Incumbent Republican Congressman Dave Reichert should also note that his constituents strongly oppose this plan and key components in it.

Back to the lunatic on the fascist right for a moment. Yesterday Bannon, a master manipulator for the severely simpleminded, spoke to neo-Nazis and imbeciles gathered for their annual convention at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in DC. McConnel was a speaker at the shindig as well, but he wasn't in the room when a deranged Bannon addressed him: "Yeah, Mitch, the donors are not happy. They’ve all left you. We’ve cut your oxygen off, Mitch." He was particularly venomous towards John Barrasso (R-WY), Bob Corker (R-TN), Dean Heller (R-NV) and Deb Fischer (R-NE). Give him a listen; he's dangerous.

How The Politics Of Healthcare Have Made Dean Heller Unelectable In Nevada

Dean Heller is a squishy mainstreamish Republican senator from Nevada. He was appointed to the seat by Republican Governor Brian Sandoval in 2011 when corrupt Republican John Ensign was forced to resign. Before getting into politics, Heller was a stock broker. In 2012 he was challenged by a corrupt New Dem, Shelley Berkley and managed to beat her 457,656 (45.87%) to 446,080 (44.71%)-- an 11,576 vote margin (against an incredibly weak and unattractive candidate who many Democrats just couldn't persuade themselves to vote for).

This cycle, Heller is a dead dog. He has a Trumpist opponent, Danny Tarkanian and another crappy DSCC-backed conservaDem just like Berkley (totally unqualified Jacky Rosen) and a Berniecrat the DSCC is trying to derail, Jesse Sbaih. Sarah Palin has already endorsed Tarkanian and the most recent poll of Republican voters shows Heller losing the primary to Tarkanian 39-31%. There is no doubt that Bannon's whole Roy Moore neo-fascist support team will be showing up in Nevada to destroy Heller as soon as they've finished destroying Luther Strange in Alabama-- and teaching Trump a lesson about where he gets his marching orders.

Unlike Heller, Rand Paul stood up to Trump's bullying and bribes

You know the TrumpCare bill that John McCain just torpedoed, commonly known as Graham-Cassidy? That was actually short for Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson. And that's weird for someone who made such a big deal about sticking with the very popular Governor who originally appointed him to the Senate, Brian Sandoval. Sandoval has denounced the bill as detrimental to Nevadans. This week the Nevada Independent report on this sounded like an early Dean Heller political obituary.

Gov. Brian Sandoval said Thursday that the flexibility fellow Republican Sen. Dean Heller promised will be good for Nevada in a health-care bill he’s sponsoring is a “false choice” because the legislation will also slash funding.

Sandoval, in a statement to the Nevada Independent, said he would not “pit seniors, children, families, the mentally ill, the critically ill, hospitals, care providers or any other Nevadan against each other” because of the steep cuts to federal funding the state would face if the Heller-sponsored measure were to pass. A state analysis, also obtained by the Nevada Independent, agrees with independent calculations from various health-care organizations estimating Nevada will lose between $600 million and $2 billion in federal funding by 2026 if the legislation passes.

As tensions mounted this week with Senate Republicans renewing a health-care debate thought to be laid to rest, Heller publicly touted the “flexibility” the measure would create by dividing up the federal dollars currently spent on the Affordable Care Act among the states in the form of a block grant. Where Sandoval only gently rebuffed Heller on Tuesday, saying he appreciated the “intended flexibility” of the bill, the careful, deliberative Sandoval-- not one to rush to the presses with a strongly worded statement-- didn’t mince words on Thursday.

“Flexibility with reduced funding is a false choice,” Sandoval said in the statement. “I will not pit seniors, children, families, the mentally ill, the critically ill, hospitals, care providers, or any other Nevadan against each other because of cuts to Nevada’s health-care delivery system proposed by the Graham-Cassidy amendment.”

Sandoval’s statement stands in sharp relief against one issued just two days earlier, in which the even-keeled governor attempted to soften the blow to Heller after authoring a letter with a group of nine other bipartisan governors urging Senate leadership not to consider the proposal. In the earlier statement, Sandoval said that Heller is “working in the best interest of the state” while gently, but firmly reiterating that he favors a bipartisan fix to the nation’s health-care system.

The recent rift between the two Republicans is also a sharp turn of events from June, when Sandoval and Heller stood side by side to harshly condemn Senate Republicans’ last repeal-and-replace plan, saying that it would strip health care away from millions of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Nevadans. Sandoval remained mum for weeks on the measure, initially drafted by South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy and signed onto by Heller amid a week of heated health-care negotiations in the Senate in July.

Heller publicly touted that “Nevada wins” under the measure, which would divvy up the block grant annually based on states’ numbers of poor or near-poor residents as well as create a per capita cap on the half-century old Medicaid program. The Republican senator, who is up for re-election in 2018, has had to walk a fine line amid discussions in the Senate over the past couple of months about repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, facing a challenge from the more conservative Danny Tarkanian.

...[W]hile the bill sponsors compare the amount of money Nevada will receive in 2026 under Graham-Cassidy when the block grant ends to how much it will receive in 2020 when the block grant begins, the correct analysis would be to compare the projected funding Nevada will receive in 2026 under the Affordable Care Act under the status quo compared to what it would receive in 2026 under Graham-Cassidy. When that comparison is done, Nevada loses between $600 million to $2 billion by most organizations’ calculations, the state analysis says.

Over months of discussions about repealing the Affordable Care Act, Sandoval has repeatedly argued against touching the extra dollars the federal health-care law made available to states that chose to opt in to an expansion of Medicaid, a point he reiterated in the Thursday statement. Sandoval was the first Republican governor to opt in to Medicaid expansion, and the state has since entirely restructured the way it provides services, such as mental health care, to rely on those new federal Medicaid dollars.

“As Governor, I made a commitment to use all the tools available to ensure Nevadans had access to affordable and quality health care. I made the decision to expand Medicaid to never before covered populations, including childless adults and pregnant women,” Sandoval said. “I made the decision to leverage all the federal funding possible through the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and to work to improve the health-care system for those with mental illness, addictions and disabilities.”

Before the state expanded Medicaid, the uninsurance rate was 20.7 percent, 27 percent for adults under 65 and 14.8 percent for children; after, the uninsured rate dropped by 9.3 percentage points, down to 11.4 percent in 2016. Between Medicaid expansion and the Silver State Health Insurance Exchange, nearly 400,000 Nevadans have gained access to health care, including more than 300,000 in Medicaid and nearly 90,000 on the exchange, Sandoval said.

According to the state’s analysis, more than 200,000 people currently receiving Medicaid will lose coverage when the block grant goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2020 and need to be moved to other coverage with unknown costs. An additional 90,000 Nevadans who purchase insurance on the exchange would also be left without access to subsidized coverage.

The per capita cap that Graham-Cassidy places on Medicaid funding, which organizations who have analyzed the bill do not believe will keep pace with the costs of providing health care, will “fundamentally” change the federal Medicaid program without analyzing the cost of long-term impacts to the state, the state analysis says.

The legislation will also reduce the ability for states to levy provider taxes from 6 percent to 4 percent over time, which will limit Nevada’s ability to help finance increased Medicaid payments to nursing homes. The reduction will result in a $10 million per year reduction in payments to nursing homes by 2025, according to the state’s analysis.

The state analysis says Graham-Cassidy will also reduce the $8 million in prevention and public health funding Nevada receives annually to pay for immunizations and conduct disease investigations to protect public health, as well as reduce Nevada’s hospitals from accessing Medicaid funds in retroactive months of eligibility in many cases, resulting in more uncompensated care and cost burdens being shifted to other parts of the health-care system.

“I have said many times before that I will not support legislation that may result in a cost shift to the State or result in Nevadans losing insurance coverage,” Sandoval said. “I cannot in good faith support the Graham-Cassidy amendment.”

Did Harry Reid Just Engineer A Reprieve For Dean Heller, The Senate's Most Endangered Republican?

Everyone knows that grotesque slob in New Jersey is the most despised governor in America, probably the most despised governor in American history (not counting convicted criminals like Rod Blagojevich and Frank Murkowski); he and Paul LePage even revel in their unpopularity, as though it were a badge of courage or honor. Even before the beached whale incident, Christie's approval was 15%. Another Republican governor, Nevada's Brian Sandoval, has a really high approval number. In an increasingly blue state, Sandoval-- like Charlie Baker (R-MA) and Larry Hogan (R-MD)-- are seen by their constituents as actually caring about them. That's unique-- Republicans who care about regular people! Sandoval's job approval is consistently in the top 10 among governors. More more than 5 times more popular among his state's voters than Chris Christie is with New Jersey voters. And, unlike Christie, Sandoval is not a fluffer for Trump and his toxic agenda.

This week, Sandoval spoke out-- again-- on the dangers of TrumpCare for Nevadans, a perspective he's helped Nevada's Republican senator, Dean Heller, to adopt as well. For TrumpCare to actually fail in the Senate, Sandoval is going to have to keep Heller on the ranch. I think he was trying hard Wednesday when he said that the Republican plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act remains a major threat to Nevada’s future fiscal health. No tweets from Señor Trumpanzee yet.

The governor said with no proposed changes that would address Nevada’s decision in 2013 to expand Medicaid, he cannot support the legislation. Sandoval said both he and U.S. Sen. Dean Heller remain opposed as they announced at an event in Las Vegas last month.

“My position is the same in terms of protecting the 200,000-plus lives of the newly eligibles associated with the Medicaid expansion,” Sandoval said. “They are living healthier and happier lives. We have cut our uninsured rate by more than half.

“As I sit here today, there hasn’t been anything presented to me that would alleviate that concern.”

Heller is considered to be a crucial Republican vote to get the Senate’s health care measure passed, but he announced his opposition with Sandoval because of the cost to the state if changes to the funding formula for the expanded Medicaid population are put in place.

Heller is up for reelection next year and is considered vulnerable. His opposition to the bill drew attacks from Republicans.

Sandoval said he has been on the phone with Vice President Mike Pence, members of the Senate and others in the Trump administration on an Obamacare replacement.

Sandoval in 2013 opted to expand the cover to childless adults, and the federal government is paying more than 90 percent of the cost of their care. That percentage would drop to 65 percent in the Senate bill starting in 2021, costing the state up to $500 million over five years.

A future governor would have to raise taxes or end the coverage, moves Sandoval called “an untenable position for the state.”

The Medicaid issue is aside from the recent announcement that the Silver State Health Exchange has no carriers lined up for 2018 that are willing to offer insurance in 14 rural counties. Sandoval said he and his staff continue to work with the insurance companies to address the issue.

Heller might have caught a break this week, as Nevada Party boss Harry Reid, put one of his most clueless and reprehensible puppets up for the Democratic nomination for Heller seat. Jacky Rosen isn't just worthless and extraordinarily stupid, she's also one of the dozen very right-wing Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party who Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy have come to depend on for when they want to claim ay of their toxic legislation is "bipartisan." ProgressivePunch rates Rosen an "F" but a really low "F." Her crucial vote score is an abysmal 37.50, one of the 12 worst of any Democrat in Congress. Among freshmen, only Blue Dogs Tom O'Halleran, an "ex"-Republican from Arizona, Josh Gottheimer, a North Jersey Wall Street whore, and Orlando's Stephanie Murphy have worse voting records. She will prove to be far too weak a candidate against Heller, even in a moderate anti-Trump wave election. Her only chance to win the most vulnerable GOP-held seat in the Senate would be for a massive anti-Trump tsunami, a ridiculous gamble and a calculation that Reid made last year and that lost with cardboard cutouts of the same kind of heap of garbage candidate that Rosen is-- from Patrick Murphy in Florida, Patty Judge in Iowa and Ted Strickland in Ohio to Ann Kirkpatrick in Arizona, Evan Bayh in Indiana and Katie McGinty in Pennsylvania-- half a dozen truly awful DSCC recruits who were all banking on one thing-- a Hillary Clinton landslide with coattails powerful enough to drag even the worst miserable candidates into office. Dean Heller must be so relieved right now!

GOP Governor Brian Sandoval's Big Gamble Is Paying Off-- For Nevada's Working Families

Out of place among the crackpots, Brian Sandoval, bottom row, #3

I doubt many Republicans are worried that Colin Powell has been talking up universal, single-payer health care-- something considerably more progressive than the Obamacare compromise conservatives forced on a naive Obama.

Powell told the audience that countries in Europe, Canada and South Korea offer universal, single-payer health care and said he often asks why the United States has not implemented the same system.

"Whether it's Obamacare, or son of Obamacare, I don't care," Powell said. "As long as we get it done."

Powell, a retired four-star general, was diagnosed with prostate cancer and credits his survival to the universal health care provided by the United States military.

…"We are a wealthy enough country," Powell said, "with the capacity to make sure that every one of our fellow citizens has access to quality health care."

Perhaps, though, Republicans are more concerned that one of their most popular governors, Nevada's Brian Sandoval-- polling-wise on another planet from detested GOP governors like Rick Scott (R-FL), Tom Corbett (R-PA), Scott Walker (R-WI), Rick Snyder (R-MI), Paul LePage (R-ME), Bobby Jindal (R-LA), Nathan Deal (R-GA), Rick Perry (R-TX), Sam Brownback (R-KS), Nikki Haley (R-SC), John Kasich (R-OH) and Pat McCrory (R-NC).

Unlike this long list of despised GOP governors, Sandoval has been working across the aisle as a moderate who is not driven by ideology or by fear of teabaggers. Democrats don't even have an opponent against him for next year. (In contrast, Corbett, for example, is so unpopular that Republican legislators want to replace him as their nominee so that he doesn't drag the whole party down to defeat. There are 9 Democrats vying to get their party's nomination.) And then there's the whole question of health care. The unpopular Republican governors oppose it and are refusing to expand Medicaid or to cooperate with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Sandoval is doing everything in his power to bring health care to Nevada residents and watching his record on ObamaCare is not very different from watching that of any of the Democratic governors who have championed it.

Sandoval is the only Republican governor whose state is both running its own health insurance exchange this year and expanding its Medicaid program under the health law. He’s arguably doing more to put the Democrats’ signature law into place than any other Republican.

But in fully implementing Obamacare, Sandoval faces a double-edged sword: He’s helping bring health care coverage to a state with the second highest uninsured rate in the country, while he may be hurting his national ambitions because he’s not actively blocking the president’s law.

…“Sandoval’s approval numbers are stratospheric, so it’s a very small group of folks who are concerned about it,” said Jon Ralston, the state’s leading political analyst. The objections came from those on the far right who “seized on that because they don’t believe Sandoval is conservative enough.”

On health care, Democrats laud him too.

“I don’t know what the politics are from his standpoint but I think it’s the right decision,” said Democratic Rep. Dina Titus, whose Nevada district has one of the highest uninsured rates in the country. “People are signing up, fortunately, in Nevada and the website is working pretty well. We’ve been very aggressive.”

Politically, it helps that Nevada is a “purple” swing state with the second highest uninsured rate in the country and especially high uninsured rates among Hispanics, a key constituency that Republicans hope to attract. That makes it easier for the Republican governor to carry out President Barack Obama’s law.

But Sandoval, 50, is also seen as a GOP up-and-comer, and Obamacare implementation could crimp any national ambitions if the health law remains as unpopular with Republicans as it is today. There’s a hint of early 2016 vice presidential buzz around Sandoval, and Obamacare implementation could be a big negative.

…States were supposed to run their own insurance exchanges but most GOP governors refused, forcing the feds to take on the job. Nevada is the only GOP-governed state running an exchange, although New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez and Idaho’s Butch Otter are partnering with the feds this year and plan to run their own next year.

And once the Supreme Court made Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion optional at the state level, GOP governors split. Some high-profile ones like Rick Perry of Texas and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana have resisted. But at least eight Republican governors have also expanded Medicaid, including New Jersey’s Chris Christie, Arizona’s Jan Brewer, Michigan’s Rick Snyder and Ohio’s John Kasich.

If ObamaCare is successful before the Republican convention, Sandoval will be sitting in the cat bird's seat when they start looking to balance out the ticket. And then there's 2020 or 2024, which might be even more propitious for a moderate Hispanic Republican from a purple state. Of course, Sandoval is being hit from the far right. Even if no Democrat wants to take Sandoval on for governor, a mentally-deranged, neo-Nazi Mormon conspiracy-theorist, David Lory Vanderbeek, is already running against him… at least on YouTube: