In early 2009, Democratic leaders offered to give Zack Space a pass on a bill to limit carbon emissions because coal was such an economic engine in his eastern Ohio district. “If you need to vote ‘no’ on this, I understand,” Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), then-chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told Space.

But the second-term Democrat sat through hearings that spring as senior Democrats worked with industry, winning the endorsement of several large utility and power companies for major environmental legislation. Space ended up voting “yes” — both in committee and then on the House floor in June 2009 — a controversial decision that played a role in his defeat in the 2010 midterms.

That same dynamic is back this year, as the House leadership struggles to convince wary Republicans to support a rewrite of the Affordable Care Act and is trying to find the right carrots to offer these last holdouts.

Why did the former Ohio congressman take such a risky vote eight years ago? It helped that some industry groups backed what became known as the cap-and-trade bill, giving Space the chance to try to explain to voters back home that it wasn’t just coastal liberals interested in mitigating climate change.

“It made it easier for me to do the right thing,” Space recalled in an interview Monday.

Eight years later, it’s House Republican leaders who are scrambling to find votes for their legislation to rewrite the ACA. After weeks of negotiations led by Vice President Pence and, sometimes, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), the GOP leadership is within shooting range of securing a majority to pass their legislative overhaul of the health-care industry.

But their final obstacle is a large pocket of moderate Republicans who come from competitive districts, the ones who may pay the price for their votes in next year’s midterm elections — the latter-day cousins to people such as Space who cast the deciding votes on the energy bill in 2009 and the ACA in 2010.

Today’s GOP leaders, however, have not gathered enough support from the various wings of the health-care industry that could help wavering Republicans take such a risky vote. There aren’t many local doctors, local hospital chief executives or insurance executives pushing these Republicans to vote for Ryan’s bill — because their national associations all oppose the legislation.

This has left these undecided Republicans without many allies back home. Instead of pointing to support from local hospital officials, they’re getting an earful from them about what is wrong with the legislation.

“I’ve spent a lot of time with them and, you know, heard their concerns and their input,” Rep. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) said leaving Tuesday morning’s Republican conference meeting.

McSally was a supporter of the first draft of the legislation but has moved into the undecided column following changes made to appeal to the conservative bloc that torpedoed the first consideration of the bill in late March.

Republican leaders say they spent time with groups such as the American Medical Association and AARP, to no avail. “We had a lot of good meetings with different organizations along the way,” Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said Tuesday.

In many ways, McSally finds herself in the same spot as Space after he decided what to do on the energy legislation: It’s not particularly popular in her district, the bill is likely to be dramatically rewritten if it ever passes the Senate. If it fails in the other chamber, McSally will be left with only one vote on the issue.

House Democrats were hung out to dry in 2010 by the Senate, where Democratic leaders decided to devote their time to approving the health-care bill and abandoned the climate- change legislation. Now, Republican leaders are urging people such as McSally to support the health-care bill — even if she doesn’t like it — so it can move on to the Senate.

“If we do vote on it, it’s the beginning of the process, it’s not the end, obviously,” she said. “It’s gotta go through the Senate. This is the legislative process, it’s the sausage-making,” she said.

Space said that is a politically dangerous game of logic. “Take one for the team? I’m here to tell you, from my experience, that isn’t going to help,” he said.

Yet he has no regret over his 2009 vote, giving a lot of credit to Rick Boucher, who was a senior Democrat on the Energy Committee. From deep southwestern Virginia, Boucher was the liaison to the coal industry and utilities that relied on cheap coal for power. “That outreach had been going on a long time,” Boucher recalled in an interview Monday.

Before the committee convened its legislative markup, President Barack Obama led an hour-long White House meeting of key committee members, and the specific contours of the legislation were agreed upon.

And Boucher also won the backing of American Electric Power and Duke Energy, two major industry players that gave Democrats, even those in coal country, what they thought was cover to explain their vote back home. In June 2009 the House passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act with 219 votes and only a couple to spare.

“We really fully expected that the Senate was going to take it up,” Boucher said.

By July 2010 the Senate officially gave up the issue and Space felt abandoned, “given the sheer and utter beating I was taking back home.”

At any town hall, he would explain Duke Energy’s support for the bill and what it meant for long-term energy production. “If I had 10 minutes with them, I could convince them. The problem is, you don’t have 10 minutes with every single constituent,” he said.

More than 20 Democrats who supported the legislation lost in 2010, the lion’s share coming from districts that were either in the industrial Midwest or in ­coal-producing regions.

“I was high on the list,” Boucher said. After he had spent 28 years in office, his support collapsed amid millions of dollars’ worth of ads funded by groups associated with the Koch brothers.

There are plenty of reasons for those heavy defeats, most prominently the unpopularity of the 2010 health-care law and Obama’s own poor standing as America struggled to pull out of the Great Recession.

Democrats gave Republicans an extra quiver to fire at them with cap-and-trade. Yet Space’s only regret is that it never became law, calling it the best vote in four years in Congress.

“That’s the one I’m most proud of,” he said.

It remains to be seen whether McSally and other wavering Republicans will feel that way about today’s health-care debate.

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