Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said Thursday that the passage of President Trump’s domestic policy agenda had boosted Democrats’ hopes of claiming the Senate majority in the 2026 midterm elections, handing them a winning economic message as they seek to contest an expanded map of states around the country.
“The three issues we’re going to most campaign on: costs, jobs, and health care,” Mr. Schumer said in an interview at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee headquarters, across the street from the Capitol. “Those affect average people and every state.”
He argued that the sweeping law to extend tax cuts and slash social safety net programs would hurt not just those who rely on Medicaid — which will be cut by nearly $1 trillion — but by a broad swath of Americans.
“It’s going raise insurance costs even if you don’t have Medicaid,” he said. “Your electricity costs will go up by 10 percent. Even not poor people, it goes across the board. And it’s hitting at the same time that your costs are going up because of tariffs.”
As they search for ways to connect with voters ahead of the midterm elections, House and Senate Democrats have been poring over polling and research that shows their likely best bet is focusing on the Republicans’ cuts to health care and food assistance programs for working people in order to help pay for tax cuts that provide the biggest benefits to the wealthy.
A recent poll conducted by Blue Rose Research on behalf of the Senate Majority PAC, an outside group aligned with Democrats, found that 50 percent of voters said they were less likely to support their representative in the upcoming election if he or she had voted for the bill. That number included 49 percent of swing voters and 17 percent of voters who supported Mr. Trump in the 2024 election.
“What Republicans have forgotten is that the trifecta they have right now is a result of gains they have made with lower-income individuals, many of the same people who are Medicaid recipients,” said Jesse Stinebring, chief executive of Blue Rose Research. “Their coalition has become much more working-class, and they are still operating under this model where these types of actions wouldn’t have political consequences for them — and they absolutely will have consequences for them.”
Mr. Schumer, who has been quietly working to recruit Democratic Senate candidates in both battleground and traditionally Republican-leaning states, said on Thursday that he had been speaking with prospects who might not have considered running back in January but were now suddenly enthusiastic about mounting Senate campaigns. He would not share the names of anyone on his wish list.
“I’m not going to talk about specific states at this point,” Mr. Schumer said, “but many states you wouldn’t think are in play are in play — our map has expanded.”
(Mr. Schumer was recently photographed having dinner in Ohio with former Senator Sherrod Brown, the raspy-voiced Democratic mainstay of his state who was defeated last year and who many Democrats hope will run for the seat that was filled by Senator Jon Husted when Vice President JD Vance left the Senate.)
The reality of the map is daunting: All but two of the 22 Republican seats in play in the midterms are in states that Mr. Trump carried by at least 10 percentage points in 2024.
In trying to sell a deeply unpopular bill, some Republicans have been highlighting small wins on the margins. In Missouri, Senator Josh Hawley held an event this week highlighting his successful fight for an expanded fund for victims of nuclear waste, a longtime personal project of his that was tucked into the policy bill after he roundly condemned the Medicaid cuts that were also included. He ultimately voted for the measure, though he conceded that the Medicaid cuts were “bad” and would harm people.
In Wisconsin, Representative Derrick Van Orden has been claiming credit for a $50 billion rural hospital fund that Senate Republicans added to the bill to blunt the impact of the Medicaid cuts. However, many lawmakers and analysts have argued that the fund will do little to reduce the impact of nearly $1 trillion in lost funding.
“They’re clinging to straws because the rest is so bad, and they haven’t offered real things to large amounts of people,” Mr. Schumer said.
A spokeswoman for the Republican Senate campaign arm did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Schumer dismissed the notion that voters would not feel the bulk of the pain from enactment of the law until after the midterms, though its cuts to Medicaid, nutrition assistance and other safety net programs are not set to be implemented until after 2026. New tax reductions would occur almost immediately.
“It you’re a hospital and you know you’re going to lose everything on Jan. 1, 2027, you’ve got to prepare a year in advance, you’ve got to start cutting now,” he said.
The Democrats’ Senate campaign arm followed up on Mr. Schumer’s comments with a list of projects in battleground states that were impacted just days after the bill was signed into law at the White House. And many Democrats have said that the effects of the bill will be bad now and worse later, creating an ongoing political opportunity for Democrats to remind voters why they are suffering and whom to blame.
In North Carolina, for example, plans to reopen a rural hospital are suddenly in jeopardy because of the loss of Medicaid funding. Two planned solar projects in Maine appear to be on hold because of the elimination of renewable energy tax credits. And in Texas, a local food bank said it was cutting its weekly services in half because of limited federal resources.
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times. She writes features and profiles, with a recent focus on House Republican leadership.
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