Dem
47
GOP
53
The BBB has passed and was signed Friday by Donald Trump. Now comes the spin. Initial polling shows that: (1) people don't know much about it (nor do the senators and representatives who voted for it) and (2) what they do know they don't like—by a wide margin. In a KFF poll 64% of adults oppose the bill and only 35% support it. Now it is up to the Democrats to use it as a baseball bat to whack the Republicans until Nov. 3, 2026. What they need is a simple message anyone can understand, like "12 million people will lose their health care and millions of children will go to bed hungry so billionaires can have a big fat tax cut." Oh, and virtually every Republican voted for it. Everything else (like ballooning the deficit) is gravy.
The ads practically write themselves. Cue mothers crying because their kids have cancer and now, due to the Medicaid cuts, they can't afford the treatment the kids were getting and the kids will die. Cue fathers saying that although they work two full-time jobs, without food stamps they can't feed their kids properly and the kids often go to bed hungry and crying. Expect to hear the words "cruel," "brutal" and "inhumane" a lot.
Republicans will frame it as a big win for wait staff who live on tips, but only about 2.5% of workers are in tipped occupations, and many of these make so little that they don't pay any federal tax at all, even now. Also, the new rule has many hoops you have to jump through to use it, so very few people will actually benefit. Democrats need to carp on that.
Historically, voters are slow to notice laws that actually help them. Obamacare was very unpopular at first. So was Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act and other bills that created jobs. Big messy bills passed using reconciliation have often cost the president control of Congress in the next midterm. This happened in 1994, 2010, and 2018, and the latter two were about health care. It is partly due to media coverage emphasizing that the party in power is using a trick (reconciliation) to ram through a highly partisan and extreme bill that the other party despises. When some of the nasty details finally get out, approval sometimes goes down further because the president's supporters learn they didn't get everything they wanted (What? Abortion wasn't banned nationally?) and opponents keep learning about even more stuff they hate. During the process, the sausage-making is front and center and people don't like that. There was a lot of last-minute publicity about Trump winning votes by giving lowly congressmen tours of Mar-a-Lago and handing them autographed kewpie dolls or something as souvenirs. Voters hate that stuff.
Summer spin aside, the Republicans have a deeper problem that can't be easily spun away. In the Trump era, the voter base of the Republican Party has moved from well-off "country club" Republicans who liked tax cuts for the rich above all else to a more working-class base that doesn't care about that stuff. But the people who de facto run the party—the billionaire donor class—haven't changed their views one iota about what is important.
This means what the leaders of the Party want is now very different from what the base wants. This is only sustainable as long as the voters are content with the crumbs they get from time to time. Of course, this means the culture war stuff becomes very important and the party leaders have to pray daily that the voters are willing to give up their own healthcare and watch their kids get sick and maybe die in order to keep trans girls from playing on girls field hockey teams in California. There is a real danger the voters will eventually wise up and realize that they don't actually like much of what the GOP is selling, especially if it has negative consequences for them personally or for their friends or family.
A handful of influential Republicans, like Steve Bannon and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), are aware of this situation, but the rest are pretending business as usual can continue indefinitely. So far this is working, but there could be surprises ahead. (V)