From the start of his second term, President Trump has bet that he can appeal to low-income voters while slashing safety net programs on which many of those voters depend.
The enormous tax-and-spending bill he is trying to push through Congress is a high-stakes test of that proposition, a gamble that Mr. Trump can retain the loyalty of his blue-collar supporters despite moves that could harm their immediate economic self-interest.
As approved by the House, the legislation cuts hundreds of billions of dollars in food benefits and removes nearly 11 million people from the health care rolls, while offering large tax cuts skewed to the rich and adding trillions to the national debt. Senate Republicans are considering a similar measure, with bigger Medicaid cuts and smaller reductions in nutritional aid.
Whether Republicans succeed in passing the bill — and whether voters punish them for lost assistance — could affect next year’s congressional elections and determine the long-term size and strength of the social welfare system.
Once mostly aimed at the indigent, aid programs were often derided by conservative critics as Democratic handouts for minority groups in urban areas. But some benefits now reach up the income ladder to working-class households, which Republicans increasingly court.
Enrollment has roughly doubled in two decades in Medicaid and food stamps (formally, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP). The Affordable Care Act, signed in 2010 by President Barack Obama, subsidized households up to 400 percent of the poverty line, and pandemic-era subsidies, which expire this year, went higher.
Some corners of the Republican Party are expressing concern that the cuts could prompt a blue-collar backlash. Tony Fabrizio, a pollster for Mr. Trump, warned that voters have “no appetite” for cutting Medicaid.
Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, called the proposed Medicaid cuts, which total about $800 billion, “morally wrong and politically suicide.” Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina has warned that voters could punish Republicans.
Democrats are hoping the blowback will help them recapture Congress and check Mr. Trump’s power. But political scientists say it is unclear whether the cuts will upset voters, or whether upset voters will blame Republicans, especially in a polarized age when few votes are truly up for grabs.
The programs are run by both federal and state officials, which makes responsibility for cuts hard to track, and Republicans have devised some changes in ways that reduce political risk, like postponing when they will take effect.
Mr. Trump has argued that the bill will stimulate the economy, aiding Americans from all backgrounds, and cited features with working-class appeal, like an end to taxes on tips. (If it fails to pass, taxes will rise significantly next year with the expiration of tax cuts enacted in his first term.) He has gone as far as denying that the House bill cuts Medicaid benefits at all, saying “the only thing we’re cutting is waste, fraud and abuse.”
“I think it’s genuinely unclear whether voters who lose Medicaid or SNAP would blame Republicans,” said Hunter Rendleman, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Many in the MAGA base have such a strong relationship with President Trump, it may be politically safe to take away their benefits. I’d call the political risk for Republicans medium.”
The G.O.P.’s courtship of low-income voters often lives in tension with traditional Republican economic policy. Certainly, some working-class households share the conservative desire for small government and low taxes or the concern that welfare discourages work.
But in courting voters of modest means, the G.O.P. has often emphasized cultural issues instead. Support for gun rights and school prayer, opposition to abortion and affirmative action, and vows to deport undocumented immigrants are among the social issues Mr. Trump has embraced.
Chagrined progressives argue that Republicans use hot-button issues to get voters to oppose their economic interests, including their interest in a strong safety net. Conservatives say cultural issues matter and call it condescending to portray working-class Republicans as dupes.
As safety net programs reach higher up the income ladder, rising costs make a tempting target for Republican budget cutters. But as programs grow, cuts could anger more voters.
Two episodes offer contrasting views of the risks of cutting aid. In 2017, Mr. Trump led a long, full-throated campaign to abolish the Affordable Care Act, which would have stripped health insurance from millions of Americans. The failed effort boosted the law’s popularity and helped Democrats retake the House the next year.
But a few years, later Republicans reversed a different aid expansion at no political cost. In 2021, Democrats passed a one-year increase in the child tax credit, giving cash assistance to millions of low-income parents and cutting child poverty to a record low. Republicans called the aid “welfare” and blocked efforts to continue it. Few voters protested.
The reductions the Republicans are seeking in Medicaid and SNAP would be the largest either program has seen. The House version of the bill would cut about $1 trillion from health care programs over 10 years, mostly from Medicaid but also by making it harder to enroll in the Affordable Care Act’s subsidized marketplace plans.
About 10.9 million Americans would lose insurance as a result, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Roughly half of that loss would come from new Medicaid work requirements.
Coupled with the end of the pandemic-era increased subsidies for marketplace plans, the House bill would reverse almost three-quarters of the decline in the uninsured rate achieved under the health law, according to an analysis by Matthew Fiedler of the Brookings Institution. The budget office has not analyzed the Senate proposals for their effect on health coverage.
In SNAP, the House would cut nearly $300 billion over a decade, about 30 percent of federal spending on the program. The largest savings would come from requiring states to share up to a quarter of benefit costs, which the federal government has always paid in full. Supporters say “skin in the game” will encourage better management. Critics say it incentivizes cuts.
The Senate parliamentarian ruled last week that the cost-sharing language violated the rules Republicans must follow to pass the bill with a simple majority. But Republicans said they would rewrite the proposal to meet parliamentary requirements.
Other SNAP savings come from expanded work requirements, which would cover parents of school-age children and include adults as old as 64. The House version of the work rules will remove 3.2 million people from the rolls, the budget office found, while other provisions cut or end aid to an additional 1.5 million. Together, that is about 11 percent of the caseload.
The bill would reduce incomes for the poorest 30 percent of Americans, change little in the middle and give the top 10th an extra $12,000 a year, the budget office found.
One feature of the House bill that may blunt political damage is its timeline. The Medicaid work program is not required to start until after the midterm elections next year, which may be necessary for adequate planning but also postpones potential backlash.
Republicans also deny that work rules are cuts.
“No one has talked about cutting one benefit in Medicaid to anyone who’s duly owed,” Speaker Mike Johnson said. “What we’ve talked about is returning work requirements.” He describes the target as “29-year-old males sitting on their couches playing video games.”
Work rules are politically popular in the abstract, and Republicans say they help the needy by increasing employment. But critics say they create bureaucratic obstacles without boosting work, and the budget office predicts they will push millions from the SNAP and Medicaid rolls.
In a 2022 review, it found that SNAP work rules “reduced income, on average” among participants because the people who lost aid far outnumbered those who increased earnings. SNAP work programs eliminated aid to 22 percent of those involved in Pennsylvania, 31 percent in Missouri and 53 percent in Virginia (though work rules had no effect in Colorado). The people who lost aid were unusually poor, the budget office found, “and many of them are homeless.”
Experience with Medicaid work rules is more limited. But an Arkansas program begun in 2018 and stopped by federal courts dropped about a quarter of the participants from the rolls while failing to increase employment. Most who lost Medicaid were working or exempt but unaware that they needed to show compliance or kept from doing so by administrative barriers.
While the bill is unpopular in polls, the likelihood for voter backlash may depend on unknowns, like the strength of the economy and the parties’ competition in messaging.
Even as Mr. Hawley warned fellow Republicans to avoid Medicaid cuts, Senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, told constituents not to worry about losing health insurance because “we all are going to die.” In a meeting of Senate Republicans this week, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky told colleagues that voters concerned about Medicaid cuts will “get over it,” Punchbowl News reported.
Republicans may gain some political protection from the bill’s sheer scale. “So many things are happening at once it makes it harder for people to understand,” Mr. Fiedler said.
Some cuts are too esoteric for anyone but experts to follow. The House bill cuts nearly $50 billion in SNAP benefits by changing how utility costs are calculated and how nutritional standards are updated.
Scholarship offers contrasting views of how well voters track policies.
Michael E. Shepherd, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, studied rural health care after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Hospital closures fell in states that expanded Medicaid, as most Democrats urged, and rose where Republicans rejected the expansion.
But voters in red states blamed Democrats, largely because Mr. Obama was president, a view that Republicans encouraged and that resonated in a partisan age. In communities where rural hospitals closed, voters increased their support for Republicans by 10 to 15 percentage points.
“These results paint a troubling picture for political accountability,” Mr. Shepherd wrote.
Likewise, Larry M. Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, found seeming contradictions in the way voters viewed tax policy. Many Americans who said they were troubled by inequality supported tax cuts for the wealthy that made inequality grow.
Parsing voter surveys, Mr. Bartels concluded that many Americans saw tax policy and inequality as unrelated realms. “What happens in the course of daily life often doesn’t get coded as being the result of political decisions, even if it is,” he said.
He doubts that the cuts in the Republican bill would change many votes. “Electoral behavior depends much less on policy preferences than on identity considerations,” he said.
But Ms. Rendleman, the Berkeley scholar, is more optimistic that Americans can align their votes and policy preferences.
In a study of subsidies for low-wage workers, she found that governors who created earned-income tax credits on the state level gained votes in the next election. The gain was greatest in states with the largest benefits and in counties with the most beneficiaries, suggesting that voters understood the policy.
While the electoral effect was small and short-lived, Ms. Rendleman called it a sign that voters watched what leaders did. “Polarization interferes with the feedback loop, but I still think there’s some room to sway the marginal voters,” she said.
Jason DeParle is a Times reporter who covers poverty in the United States.
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