Republicans may have bet too heavily on the wrong issue going into the midterm elections.

When the health care law’s website wasn’t working, the law itself was at its most unpopular and its most newsworthy, and the president’s poll numbers were cratering, many Republicans made the calculation that they could ride the wave of woe to an overwhelming electoral victory in November.

But betting on stasis is stupid. Things change.

The White House called in the geek squad, and they fixed the site. Last week, the White House also announced that four million people have now enrolled in the health care program. The president’s poll numbers have stabilized, albeit in negative territory. The news winds shifted. And Democrats have found an issue that they can campaign on and that America likes — helping the working class through things like raising the minimum wage.

A Washington Post/ABC News poll released Wednesday found that 50 percent of respondents would be more likely to vote for a congressional candidate who supports increasing the minimum wage, as opposed to 19 percent who said that they were less likely. Twenty-eight percent said that it wouldn’t make a difference.

A closer look at the numbers reveals that 72 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of the all-important independents would be more likely to vote for candidates who support the increase.

The same poll found that 34 percent of respondents are more likely to vote for candidates who support the federal health care law, while 36 percent are less likely to vote for them and 27 percent said it wouldn’t make a difference.

Seventy percent of Republicans were less likely to vote for a candidate who supported the law, while only 35 percent of independents are less likely to vote for a candidate who supports it.

The strength in these numbers is obviously on the side of what the Democrats are for, rather than what the Republicans are against.

This is by no means the determining factor for the midterms, but the sense of impending doom among Democrats is beginning to ease.

To be sure, there are still issues. The health care law remains unpopular, and Obama keeps adjusting the rules that govern it. It remains unclear whether the program will sign up enough young, healthy people to make it work as desired. As CNN put it:

“For months, administration officials embraced CBO estimates anticipating that 18- to 34-year-olds would comprise roughly 40 percent of the total. The current number is about 27 percent.”And as The New York Times pointed out last week, polls show that Republicans maintain a small electoral edge. But small is the operative word here. As the paper pointed out, “42 percent say they will back Republicans in November, and 39 percent indicate that they will back Democrats, a difference within the poll’s margin of sampling error.”

So now we have Republicans desperately searching for a fallback.

Darrell Issa, the chairman of Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sought to keep the fading I.R.S. “scandal” on life support by once again calling the former I.R.S. official Lois Lerner to testify. He sought a link between how an I.R.S. official managed an avalanche of new applications by politically active groups for tax-exempt status and the White House, or at least a wider anti-Tea Party conspiracy. Once again, Republicans failed. Lerner invoked her Fifth Amendment right, again. And Issa made himself the chief spectacle in a quixotic partisan scene, again, by cutting off the Democratic congressman Elijah Cummings’s mic when he attempted to speak. Bad form.

Paul Ryan has begun to focus on poverty from a Republican perspective, releasing a report this week that calls for cutting programs designed to help the poor. Only in the Republican house of mirrors does this make sense, but he essentially makes the argument that current programs haven’t eliminated poverty but, in some ways, have made it worse. The mitigating factors at play are given short shrift.

Furthermore, Ryan’s version of Compassionate Conservative 2.0 seems to be built on bad, or at least distorted, math, as is Ryan’s wont. As The Fiscal Times reported Tuesday, “several economists and social scientists contacted on Monday had reactions ranging from bemusement to anger at Ryan’s report, claiming that he either misunderstood or misrepresented their research.”

And since President Vladimir V. Putin moved Russian forces into Crimea, Republicans have fallen over one another to be among the first to hang the crisis around the president’s neck.

Senator John McCain said this week that we should care about Putin’s push “because this is the ultimate result of a feckless foreign policy where nobody believes in America’s strength any more.”Senator Lindsey Graham, never one to be bettered on the outrage scale, attempted once again to demonstrate that among some Republicans, all roads lead to Benghazi, Libya. In a series of tweets Tuesday, the senator said:

“It started with Benghazi. When you kill Americans and nobody pays a price, you invite this type of aggression. #Ukraine”

“Putin basically came to the conclusion after Benghazi, Syria, Egypt — everything Obama has been engaged in — he’s a weak indecisive leader.”

“I think Putin believes Obama is really all talk and no action. And unless we push back soon, the worse is yet to come.”

Conservatives are painting a picture of a president who is domestically dictatorial but internationally anemic, but that is schizophrenic and strains credulity.

They seem to be grasping at straws now that their best cudgel is splintering.