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The healthcare vote lit a fire that could engulf the Republican House majority. Photograph: Rick Bowmer/AP

As House Republicans reached the vote count needed to pass an unpopular rewrite of a new healthcare law, Democrats chanted derisively. Na na na na, na na na na, they sang, confident Republicans would soon regret their support for the bill. Hey hey hey, goodbye!

Seven years before that, Democrats on the other side of the aisle had cast contentious votes for a healthcare bill with steep political consequences. Subsequently, in the first elections after Barack Obama took office, they lost their majority in the House in a resounding electoral rebuke.

On Thursday, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who lost her speakership in 2010 after playing an instrumental role in pushing through the Affordable Care Act, considered the Republican triumph.

They have this vote tattooed on them, she said. This is a scar they carry.

Republicans argued that the greater political risk would have been to do nothing. Failure to deliver on a signature campaign promise after seven years would have demoralized the base heading into an election cycle in which the party of the president usually loses seats.

[Republicans] have this vote tattooed on them. This is a scar they carry.

If we werent able to repeal and replace Obamacare, it would have been a bad midterm for us, said the New York congressman Chris Collins, who voted for the measure, after walking off the floor on Thursday. I think we will at least hold our own if not pick up seats in the midterm.

But soon after House Republicans passed their bill, political winds began to shift. Liberals sprang into action, organizing weekend protests outside Republican offices. Groups raising money to unseat House Republicans reported record-breaking hauls. By Friday morning, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report (CPR) had shifted 20 House races to categories more favorable to Democrats.

David Wasserman, the CPR House editor, called the healthcare bill an unequivocal political risk for dozens of Republicans who supported it and even possibly for those who did not. For example, the representatives Mike Coffman, of Colorado, and Leonard Lance, of New Jersey, both voted against the bill. Both saw their races moved into less safe categories, toss-up and lean R respectively.

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) brushed off such assessments and pointed to the failure of pollsters and analysts to predict Trumps victory over Hillary Clinton in November.

House Republicans fulfilled the promise they made to the American people to repeal and replace Obamacare, an NRCC spokesman, Jesse Hunt, said in an email. [Thursday] marked the beginning of the end for the disastrous law. Let the Beltway prognosticators who predicted a Hillary Clinton landslide stare into their clouded crystal balls once again.

Let the Beltway prognosticators who predicted a Clinton landslide stare into their clouded crystal balls once again

Polls, however, have found that the Republican healthcare plan is woefully unpopular. A Quinnipiac poll released in late March found that just 17% of respondents expressed support while 56% opposed it.

Republicans approved the bill before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had time to analyze how much it would cost and how many people might lose coverage if the plan takes effect. An analysis of the first Republican plan, which did not reach the floor of the House, found that 24 million people would lose insurance coverage.

For most members, voting for the bill was probably a smart choice that made them safer, said Liz Mair, a Republican strategist. But for a handful of members, this was a risk that will probably cost them their jobs. The question is whether it is enough to flip the House.

Democrats need to gain 24 seats to win control in November 2018. At the top of their list of targets are 23 Republicans in districts that went for Clinton in November. Fourteen of them supported the healthcare plan.

One of those Republicans, Carlos Curbelo of Florida, issued a taped statement in which he said Thursdays vote was just a step to fixing healthcare and said lawmakers still have a long way to go before they get it right. Clinton won Curbelos district by 16 points.

Democratic organizers said the vote had unleashed a backlash on a scale they had not seen before.

The healthcare vote lit a fire that could engulf the Republican House majority, said Ben Wikler, Washington director of MoveOn.org, a liberal group. Unfortunately, it could also cost tens of millions of Americans their lives if it leads to a rollback of healthcare coverage.

MoveOn.org joined a coalition of liberal groups, including Planned Parenthood, to organize 75 protests targeting House Republicans who supported the bill and senators who will soon take it up. Wikler also pointed to a surge in political donations in the day since the vote.

ActBlue, an online fundraising platform for progressive organizations, set up a campaign in response to the healthcare vote, aiming to raise money for Democrats challenging 24 vulnerable Republicans who supported the repeal plan. In partnership with other liberal organizations, it quickly raised more than $2m.

Clinton issued a tweet that linked to the fundraising page, writing: A shameful failure of policy & morality by GOP today. Fight back on behalf of the millions of families that will be hurt by their actions.

Wikler said House Republicans can also expect to face a wall of outrage from people who feel personally threatened by their vote.

People are looking for any possible way to fight back, he said.

In Texas, Colin Allred, a civil rights attorney and former linebacker with the Tennessee Titans who recently announced a Democratic run to unseat the Republican congressman Pete Sessions, said constituents in the north Dallas district he hopes to represent were reacting in a visceral way to the healthcare vote.

On Thursday night, Allred said, dozens turned up to a coffeehouse campaign event that would typically draw only a handful of constituents.

People were angry, they were scared and they were really shocked at the callousness of this healthcare plan and the way it was done, Allred said.

Sessions, the chairman of the House rules committee, said the bill was imperfect but supported it as a first step toward repealing and replacing what he called a discriminatory system that picks winners, creates losers and oppresses American people. Democrats are targeting his suburban district, which Clinton won by two points in November.

This is where I was born and raised and I have never seen anything comparable to this, Allred said of liberal activism in the area. People here have been waiting a long time for vehicle to express that outrage and Im certain that in 2018 this reaction will not fade.

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Is healthcare vote the tipping point for liberals regaining control of the House? - The Guardian