Demoralized Democrats who have denounced President Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill have landed on a silver lining. It is so unpopular with voters, they say, that it could win them back one, if not both, chambers of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.
Top officials in the party, who see the bill as cruel, fiscally ruinous and the single biggest wealth transfer in American history, expect that they can blame the loss of health care coverage, nursing home care and food security for millions of Americans on the Republicans who voted for such policies in order to extend the 2017 tax cuts that favor the wealthy.
And they have plenty of quotes from Republicans like Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska denouncing their own bill that, Democrats say, will make the argument that much more potent.
“There’s going to be some powerful ads,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the chamber’s Democratic leader, before rattling off potential scripts for advertisements that are set to begin airing as early as next week. “‘My daughter had cancer. She was doing fine. Well, all of a sudden, her health care was blown up.’ ‘I worked at this rural hospital for 30 years. I put my heart into it because I wanted to help people. I was fired.’ Stuff like that is going to really matter.”
It may take a while for people to feel the full effects of the bill because Republicans front-loaded some temporary tax cuts for working people, like no taxes on tips, that were engineered to appeal to working-class voters. The cuts to Medicaid are not set to be implemented until after the midterm elections.
Still, there were some immediate effects. A clinic in southwest Nebraska announced this week that it was closing, blaming anticipated cuts to Medicaid. And Democrats said they expected millions of people to feel the impact from the bill’s allowing credits from the Affordable Care Act to expire. It will be up to Democrats over the next year to drive home the case that these policies are the fault of Republican lawmakers.
The party is starting in good shape: A slew of recent polls show that the bill is deeply unpopular, including one by the nonprofit health care research group KFF that found that 64 percent of voters viewed the bill unfavorably.
“The extent of its impact will rely, in part, on how effective Democrats are in laying out the negative trade-offs of the bill and how quickly people feel them,” said David Axelrod, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama.
For now, Democrats think they are in a strong position to hammer the most vulnerable Republican House members, who represent tens of thousands of voters on Medicaid and who themselves said they opposed cuts up until they voted for them.
In his marathon speech on the House floor, which began at 4:53 a.m. on Thursday and lasted more than eight and a half hours, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, singled out by name the most vulnerable members of Congress that Democrats hope to unseat next year. The list included Representatives Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, David Valadao of California, and Nick LaLota and Mike Lawler of New York, among others.
Mr. Jeffries highlighted an April 14 letter that more than a dozen of these lawmakers addressed to House Speaker Mike Johnson, in which they expressed grave concerns about cutting Medicaid.
“We are committed to working with you to preserve Medicaid,” they wrote in the letter. Mr. Jeffries noted that they subsequently voted for the legislation that slashed Medicaid at every step of the process.
Mr. Jeffries also noted that, in Mr. Lawler’s district, “more than 30,000 New Yorkers will lose their health care.” Mr. Lawler was one of the few Republicans on the House floor early Thursday morning listening to Mr. Jeffries’s speech.
House Majority Forward, a group affiliated with the House Democrats’ main super PAC, is set to immediately begin advertising in the districts held by three vulnerable Republicans, Representatives Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Tom Barrett of Michigan and Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin.
The group affiliated with the Senate Democrats’ super PAC, Majority Forward, has already been airing advertisements in five states: Alaska, Iowa, Maine, North Carolina and Georgia, where Senator Jon Ossoff is the most vulnerable Democrat seeking re-election next year.
J.B. Poersch, the Majority Forward president, said the Republican position was “almost like an outdated, early 2000s view of what their party coalition is.” He added: “Those people who receive food assistance, a lot of people who get support through Medicaid, these folks represented part of the coalition that elected Trump last time and are part of the swing of the upcoming election. They’re on the wrong side of this argument.”
Democratic groups are also looking to expand their advertising blitz to prominent podcasters, who would read ad scripts on their shows.
Democrats are hoping the policy bill will unite a party still often lost in its own intraparty feud, pointing fingers at one another over why they suffered such stunning losses in 2024 that left them completely out of power in Washington and unsure of how to move forward.
“There’s been a lot of navel-gazing about what’s going on with the party and where did we go wrong,” said former Representative Conor Lamb, the Pennsylvania Democrat whose special-election victory in January 2018 was an early sign of what was then the party’s resurgence. “This bill gives us a new task and gives us a new day and restarts the clock for a new campaign.”
Democratic groups are already mobilizing to educate their voters about the bill, which they broadly frame as an enormous transfer of wealth from the nation’s poor to its wealthy. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. is planning two months of bus tours that will visit more than 35 cities from coast to coast.
Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, said the bill’s passage made his party’s long shot dream of winning back the Senate much more realistic.
“To know this bill is to hate it,” Mr. Schatz said in an interview. “But once it’s enacted, people will start to dig into its individual provisions, and, frankly, they are all terrible and unpopular. So our job is to point out, when kids get less to eat, when rural hospitals shutter, when the price of electricity goes up, that this is because of what your Republican elected official did.”
Representative Suzan DelBene, the chairwoman of the House Democrats’ campaign arm, said in an interview that the party would make the case that Republicans care more about avoiding Mr. Trump’s wrath than about protecting their constituents.
“People are not putting their communities first,” she said. “They’re just blindly loyal to Donald Trump.”
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times. She writes features and profiles, with a recent focus on House Republican leadership.
Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
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