A Record Number of Democrats are Running on Medicare for All

Nearly four in ten Democratic U.S. House candidates now back a single payer healthcare system, but very few are running in the districts that will decide the majority.

By Kyle Tharp, Chaotic Era

New data: A record number of Democrats are running on Medicare for All

More Democratic congressional candidates than ever before have voiced support for Medicare for All, according to new data I’ve compiled for this newsletter.

Over the past few weeks, I used a handful of AI tools to scrape and cross-check candidate websites, local news coverage, and election position trackers in order to pin down where each of the more than 400 Democratic candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives who have made the general election ballot this November stands on the issue.

Here’s what I found: 163 of them, or roughly 38 percent of the candidates I tracked, explicitly support Medicare for All or a single-payer healthcare system. The other 272 stop short of endorsing single payer, instead staking out a spectrum of positions on expanding Medicare eligibility or strengthening the Affordable Care Act.

(One caveat before we go further: voters in a handful of states have yet to choose their nominees. Massachusetts holds its primary today, while New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Delaware vote over the next few weeks, so another three or four Democratic House candidates will likely join the list of supporters on the ballot this fall.)