Missouri voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition C, which makes it unlawful for the government "to penalize citizens for refusing to purchase private health insurance or infringe upon the right to offer or accept direct payment for lawful healthcare services." Obviously, this is a direct conflict with the President's health care law, which does just that. The ballot initiative passed with 71% of the vote.
There are two practical considerations here. First, one of the problems with Attorneys General suing to stop the law from being implemented is that they generally cannot go into court to assert someone else's rights - that is, they lack standing to do so. By creating a conflict with federal law, the Missouri Attorney General may one day sue, claiming that he is really just defending a Missouri law. This, at least, is the argument that Judge Hudson recently accepted in granting the Virginia Attorney General standing to sue.
The second consideration is that the law effectively works as a test of the Republican message in the fall. In a lot of ways, Missouri is a good state for testing out the message: It is a swing state that leans a few ticks right of center. In this respect, it is similar to a lot of districts where the battle for Congress will be fought in the fall.
The results should terrify Democrats. The initiative has carried just about every county in the state, usually with about 80% of the vote. Currently, the only place it is trailing is heavily Democratic St. Louis City, where it is losing by a surprisingly narrow 58%-42% margin. Now this shouldn't be interpreted as a direct repudiation of ObamaCare - most voters probably didn't realize that this is what the President's law does. But it suggests that the Republicans' message for the fall - which will almost certainly focus in part on the individual mandate - has resonance that is both extremely broad and extremely wide.
Sean Trende is Senior Elections Analyst for RealClearPolitics. He can be reached at strende@realclearpolitics.com.
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