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Scott Brown won Republicans a big victory on Jan. 19. But Mitt Romney may have won them an even bigger one.To credit former Gov. Romney with a role in Senator-elect Brown's Massachusetts upset, and the consequent likely death of the health reform bill, might at first seem ludicrous. Romney played almost no public role in Brown's campaign, mainly because the Michigan-bred Republican is no longer very popular in the Bay State. (During his bid for the 2008 presidential nomination, in which Romney made an abrupt rightward turn, campaign aides actually classified Massachusetts a "bogeyman" to run against—along with France, taxes, Hollywood values, moral relativism, Hillary Clinton, and jihadism.) "There's no added advantage in having Romney with Brown," David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center in Boston, told Politico's Alex Isenstadt on Jan. 18, "and there's potentially some disadvantage. I don't think there's an upside here at all.

But there is evidence that Romney played a powerful indirect role in Brown's victory by persuading Massachusetts voters that they didn't need the health care reform bill that Brown and his fellow Republicans oppose. How did he achieve that? By giving them a slightly more left-wing version of the same health reform plan four years ago.

According to an election-night poll by Scott Rasmussen (who leans conservative but has a pretty good track record), 56 percent of Massachusetts voters said health care was the most important factor in their voting decisions, compared with only 25 percent who rated the economy the most important factor. A narrow majority of 51 percent said they opposed the health reform bill, compared with 47 percent who favored it. Fifty percent said they'd prefer no health reform bill at all to the one being hatched in Washington. (Brown's position: "I will insist they start over.") That jibes with an exit poll conducted by the Republican firm Fabrizio, McLaughlin, & Associates, which found that 52 percent of voters opposed health care reform. Forty-eight percent said it was the single issue determining their vote. (No independent exit polls are available, apparently because the Boston Globe and the national press decided, early on, that conducting any would not be worth their while.)

Because Massachusetts has had its own version of health care reform since 2006—one that serves as the closest model for Obamacare—it is tempting to conclude that, in voting for Brown, Bay Staters were saying, "We've tried it and it stinks." There's no question that some people in Massachusetts feel this way, most notable among them Dr. Jeffrey S. Flier, dean of Harvard Medical School. (On Jan. 11 Flier hosted a symposium that mostly dumped all over Romneycare.)