Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation with Nate Silver, the author of “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything” and the newsletter Silver Bulletin, and Lis Smith, a Democratic communications strategist and author of the memoir “Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story,” to discuss the aftermath of the passage of President Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill.
Frank Bruni: Let’s start with that megabill, the bigness of which made the consequences of its enactment hard to digest quickly. Now that we’ve had time to, er, chew it over, I’m wondering if you think Democrats are right to say — to hope — that it gives them a whole new traction in next year’s midterms.
I mean, the most significant Medicaid cuts kick in after that point. Could Trump and other Republicans avoid paying a price for them in 2026? Or did they get much too cute in constructing the legislation and building in that delay and create the possibility of disaster for themselves in both 2026 and 2028, when the bill’s effect on Medicaid, as well as on other parts of the safety net, will have taken hold?
Lis Smith: If history is any guide, Republicans will pay a price for these cuts in the midterms. In 2010, Democrats got destroyed for passing Obamacare, even though it would be years until it was fully implemented. In 2018, Republicans were punished just for trying to gut it. Voters don’t like politicians messing with their health care. They have been pretty consistent in sending that message.
I’d argue that Democrats have an even more potent message in 2026 — it’s not just that Republicans are messing with health care, it’s that they are cutting it to fund tax cuts for the richest Americans.
Nate Silver: What I wonder about is Democrats’ ability to sustain focus on any given issue. At the risk of overextrapolating from my home turf in New York, Zohran Mamdani just won a massive upset in the Democratic mayoral primary by focusing on affordability. And a message on the Big, Beautiful Bill could play into that. But the Democratic base is often more engaged by culture war issues, or by messages that are about Trump specifically — and Trump isn’t on the ballot in 2026 — rather than Republicans broadly. The polls suggest that the Big, Beautiful Bill is extremely unpopular, but a lot of those negative views are 1) among people who are extremely politically engaged and already a core Democratic constituency, or 2) snap opinions among the disengaged that are subject to change. Democrats will need to ensure that voters are still thinking about the bill next November, and tying it to actual or potential changes that affect them directly and adversely.
Smith: Republicans have handed Democrats the clearest contrast in a generation. And if Democrats are smart and relentless in their messaging, we can shift the perception that Republicans are the party of working people and begin to win back some of the working-class voters we’ve been losing in recent election cycles.
Bruni: Both of you are, in different ways, bringing up the problem of Democratic discipline, of Democrats’ quickness to become distracted by matters other than what’s central to voters’ decisions and by the party’s various component groups obsessing over their particular concerns. I hear you saying the Big, Beautiful Bill is potentially a great opportunity that Democrats may bungle? Based on Democrats’ responses so far, how likely is the party to get this right, and are there people — voices — in the party who are getting it very right?
Smith: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has been focused and aggressive on communicating about this bill. He’s called out the Republican members of Congress in his state who voted for it, he’s laid out the disastrous consequences it will have for Medicaid and SNAP recipients, as well as rural hospitals, and he’s done it in pretty plain and visceral language.
Silver: Maybe the question is how much 2028 intrudes onto 2026. After all, the 2028 Democratic nomination is coming amid such a power vacuum in the party that the jockeying for it starts now. But Democrats have mostly fielded good congressional candidates, even though they’ve had some duds for the presidency in the past three elections. And congressional candidates understand that midterms often are about cost-of-living issues — and the public’s general aversion to massive legislative changes, as after Obamacare in 2010. But does the O.B.B.B.A. make for photo ops and cable news and podcast appearances in the same way that cultural issues do? I’m not so sure.
Smith: Yeah, it’s hard to sustain coverage for substantive policy issues. That’s why Shapiro’s approach in calling out the Republicans who voted for it is smart — conflict drives news and attention. Democrats shouldn’t shy away from brass-knuckle tactics. They should also focus on the direct human toll — tell the stories of the people who will be impacted by these cuts.
Bruni: Shapiro isn’t alone in his approach. North Carolina’s Democratic governor — our own Josh, surname Stein — has responded in a similarly blunt, here-are-the-practical-implications fashion. Governors in general are better at this stuff than federal lawmakers, as my Times Opinion colleague Michelle Cottle recently observed.
But back to the specific content of the megabill: As has been widely and well observed, the Americans who fare best under it are the wealthiest ones. But its authors were careful to include provisions — such as an increase in the child tax credit, new $1,000 “Trump accounts” for newborns and new deductions for tip income, overtime pay and automobile loans — that enable them to tell and sell a populist story. Is there a chance this morally offensive and fiscally reckless sprawl is smart politics for Trump and helps Republicans in the end?
Smith: Obviously, Republicans have been spinning that the positives of these other provisions will outweigh the negatives of the Medicaid cuts, but that Republican spin is magical thinking. One, more people are affected by the Medicaid cuts. Two, the message of Republicans cutting Medicaid to fund tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires couldn’t be simpler.
Silver: In the long run, I come back to people evaluating this more based on tangible consequences than on vibes. Democrats overstate the extent to which “messaging” matters on bread-and-butter issues. If people are getting checks of various kinds or seeing their taxes lowered, they’re going to be happy. If they see benefits being taken away, they won’t be. I don’t see Republicans’ general interest in squeezing the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich as being an optimal political strategy in general — well, at least not if you want to win the most votes. Maybe if you want to please the people who are funding your campaigns, though the effects of money in campaigns are generally overstated.
Bruni: “Please the people who are funding your campaigns”? Nate, when did political parties ever do that?!? I’m shocked at the notion.
Silver: Let’s keep in mind that Republicans have not exactly been a massively successful political party, despite Democrats’ highly unpopular brand at the moment. Last year was the first time they won the popular vote for the presidency since 2004, and their majorities in Congress are narrow. They won the election on immigration, inflation, Biden’s age and maybe wokeness, not their attitude toward the welfare state.
Bruni: Nate, you just brought up immigration. A new Gallup poll shows that President Trump’s support for “handling the immigration issue” has sits at a measly 35 percent, with 62 percent in opposition. The Trump administration’s militarized, indiscriminate crackdown on immigration is proving unpopular — including among independents. Could it be that what Trump and his supporters have long deemed to be one of his greatest assets — his sternness when it comes to the border and migrants — is turning into a grave liability?
Silver: I’m going to cite this as people putting too much emphasis on an outlier poll. In our tracking, Trump’s approval on immigration is a net negative-4.5, as compared with a negative-7.6 overall. It’s actually his least bad issue, as compared with the economy-adjacent stuff. I do think Democrats, like Republicans, have a problem with poll cherry-picking that reflects the narrative they want to hear.
Bruni: A fair and important point about cherry-picking, Nate. But I have to believe — or, in order to sleep at night, have persuaded myself to believe — that cracks about any escapees from the so-called Alligator Alcatraz migrant detention center in Florida being eaten by swamp carnivores are not political winners. Trump, Kristi Noem and their masked stormtroopers overestimate the American appetite for gratuitous cruelty. (Sorry, Secretary Noem, most of us do not shoot our disobedient pups.)
That’s crucially different from my thinking that voters would make a rejection of such cruelty their primary driver. I fear that if Trump delivers them, or persuades them that they have a strong economy, many will turn a blind eye to a whole lot else. But trading lovely hymns to Lady Liberty for macabre musings about an Everglades abattoir is a dicey strategy (along with being a crystalline portal to Trump’s soul).
Silver: The public might not like Alligator Alcatraz, to the extent that they’ve heard about it. But most people aren’t consuming much political news on a daily basis. That matters a bit less in the midterms than in presidential elections since low-engagement folks usually don’t vote in them.
Bruni: Lis, are you hearing any effective messaging from Democrats on this issue, either criticizing the administration’s cruel and legally questionable approach or offering an alternative?
Smith: Yes. Representative Tom Suozzi, who won his special election in 2024 by going on offense against his Republican opponent on immigration, has offered up some interesting messaging on this issue. He’s been talking about a business, badges and Bible coalition that brings together business owners, law enforcement officials and spiritual leaders — people not typically associated with Democrats — to drive home how Trump’s immigration policy isn’t just broken, but it’s also bad for the economy and bad for public safety. That’s the kind of broad, cross-partisan coalition Democrats will need if we’re going to flip Trump’s supposed strength into a liability.
But more fundamentally, Democrats will not be able to benefit politically from Trump’s draconian immigration policies unless they reclaim credibility on the issue. That means starting every conversation about immigration by saying what most voters believe: We need a secure border, and we need to deport violent criminals.
Bruni: Former President Barack Obama recently broke with his relatively hands-off, mum’s-the-word approach to the first six months of the current Trump administration and challenged Democrats to “toughen up.” Confronting the threats posed by President Trump and the G.O.P., he said, will “require a little bit less navel-gazing and a little less whining and being in fetal positions.”
What does uncurling from the fetal position look and sound like? Precisely how should Democrats toughen up? Lis, you mentioned the “brass knuckles” tactic of Governor Shapiro calling out Republican members of Congress by name. What else?
Smith: Well, I think there are two ways to look at what he said. Yes, we need to get tougher and more confrontational sometimes. But we also need to get out there more, leave our ideological bubble and take some risks. My big criticism of the Biden-Harris communications strategy and national Democrats’ communications in general is that it is extremely risk-averse. We talk only to friendly outlets like MSNBC and communicate with voters who already share our worldview. That’s got to stop.
Communication is a big part of leadership, so I’m going to offer up an audacious suggestion: The Democratic presidential nominee in 2028 should be someone who can actually communicate effectively in the 2028 media ecosystem.
Bruni: There are clearly some prominent Democrats who share your thinking and take that advice. Pete Buttigieg — whose presidential campaign you helped run — sprints to unlikely outlets on the right to show that he’s comfortable there and has words for that audience. Gavin Newsom has taken steps in that direction.
Nate, how would you write a script for Democratic toughening?
Silver: I wrote about this recently in the context of Democrats’ struggles among younger men. I think they sometimes don’t understand that a lot of Americans like a message of risk-taking and self-reliance, and they don’t necessarily want to be coddled. There’s also an issue where the parties are selecting for different personality types. In general, Democrats rate higher on Big 5 personality traits like openness to experience and conscientiousness, but also what’s sometimes politely called “negative emotionality” but is more often referred to as “neuroticism.”
Democrats could stand to be a bit more chill and not treat every issue as an existential threat. Again, this gets at the difference between winning the daily messaging battle and winning the long-term war. What two or three things are voters going to be thinking about when they enter the ballot booth next year? And which party is more trustworthy on them?
Bruni: I want to express a concern or rather sound a note of toughening-up caution. Isn’t it all too easy for a rallying cry to bleed into a screech, at least to the ears of the voters in the middle who often decide elections? And if elections are about contrasts, to cite a musty adage, what contrast is there in each side bellowing at and about the other? Might there be some political edge to projecting a less vengeful, less vitriolic image — to arguing the merits of the case without any glimmer of zealousness? I’m reminded that Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020 by soothing and promising sanity. Do the autocratic excesses of Trump 2.0 render that approach toothless and quaint?
Silver: To once again play the dangerous game of extrapolating from the New York mayoral primary, I think it’s notable that Mamdani ran a pretty darned sunny campaign. You can even literally see the cinematic quality in his commercials — maybe it comes from his mother’s filmmaking background — but they make New York feel like a happy place like Sesame Street.
What’s tricky is that stoking grievance probably does work in the short run. But those messages may be getting stale. For three election cycles in a row, Democrats’ core message in various forms was that Trump was an existential threat. It worked in 2020 in the pandemic year, when the world felt like it was falling apart. But not in 2016 or 2024.
Smith: There is this strain of thinking that to beat Trump, we have to be Trump. That was the rationale behind Andrew Cuomo’s flaccid campaign in the New York City mayoral primary. He banked most of his campaign on being a tough guy who would stand up to Trump. It fell flat. I don’t think emulating Trump or yelling and screaming all the time is a smart political tactic. I actually think the Democrats who will capture the American people’s imagination are the ones who will be able to tell a story and paint a picture of what a post-Trump America could be.
Bruni: A paradox of Trump’s presidencies — of his political career — is that the herky-jerky, hurly-burly activity every week is coupled with an approval rating that never changes all that much. Unstable behavior and enormous upheavals, regarding tariffs and taxes and immigration and more, yield stable reviews. On your site, Nate, that rating sits at around 44 percent, versus 52 percent disapproval, which is par for the course for him and contradicts voters’ souring on the way he’s approaching issue after issue. We seem to be in a mathematically incoherent universe where 2 minus 2 equals 2. How do you two explain this? Are we asking the wrong performance questions, misunderstanding the most important individual ingredients that go into an overall performance assessment?
Smith: These polls highlight the daunting task ahead for Democrats. Within liberal bubbles, there is this feeling that everything is in chaos and Trump’s numbers are in free-fall and that every voter is dialed into the ups and downs and daily soap opera of the Trump administration. But that just isn’t the case. To me, what these polling numbers underscore is the need for Democrats to be disciplined in what they focus on and relentless and smart in communicating about it.
Silver: My general bias when considering polling is to focus on the toplines, not the internal numbers or the cross tabs. And that goes for issue questions. If you ask voters a bunch of detailed questions about immigration policy, and they side with the Democratic position, but then you turn around and ask them who they trust on the issue more overall and they say Trump and Republicans, that ought to tell you something.
Maybe you’re not asking the right questions. Or maybe the questions you are asking reflect some degree of implicit bias or presume more knowledge of the voter than she or he actually has. But you don’t need to impute a voter’s overall position on an issue from piecemeal questions when you’ve asked them directly about it.
Bruni: Which three cabinet members or senior officials in the Trump administration, in descending order, pose the greatest threat to Trump’s and Republicans’ political fortunes?
Silver: The obvious answer is Attorney General Pam Bondi and F.B.I. deputy director Dan Bongino. (I know that’s just two.) I’m pretty sure I’ve never written the name “Jeffrey Epstein” in one of these chats before; it’s one of those stories that I’ve always tuned out when it’s anywhere in sniffing distance. But this is probably as close as we’ve gotten to a real test of loyalty among the MAGA base, his “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue” moment.
Smith: Bondi, for her mishandling of the Epstein matter. She either lied to the American people when she said she had the Epstein client list on her desk or she is engaged in a massive cover-up. Both bad. Pete Hegseth is a ticking time bomb with his complete mismanagement of Defense. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has the potential to cause the most long-term damage.
Bruni: What odds do you give Democrats of winning the House majority in November 2026?
Smith: I’ll leave the odds to Nate here, but they were good before Republicans passed their disastrous budget. They’re even better now.
Silver: It’s got to be at least 80 percent, or maybe higher, as reluctant as I am to make a forecast this far out. There’s a strong base line of poor performance for the president’s party at the midterms, the G.O.P. majority is narrow, Trump is unpopular, and the Democratic base increasingly consists of college-educated voters who are more likely to participate in midterms than the Trump base.
Bruni: Democrats would obviously love to win the Senate, too — a much tougher task. Beyond the obvious pickup opportunities of Maine and North Carolina, which unlikely state might conceivably give Democrats a surprise red-to-blue triumph?
Silver: I’d note that Democrats are having trouble recruiting a good candidate in Maine. It’s by far the bluest state with a competitive Senate race in either 2026 or 2028. So if you’re not giving it your all there, you’re really injuring your chance of ending up with some sort of trifecta by 2029.
But I do think there are some other opportunities on the map. Texas, Ohio, Alaska, Iowa and Florida are all fairly red-leaning. But in Trump’s only previous midterm, in 2018, the overall political environment (based on the House popular vote) was what someone like me would call a D+8 or a D+9, meaning the whole country was shifted eight or nine points to the blue side relative to normal. If we get a repeat of that environment next year, lots of red-leaning states could become competitive with the right candidates.
Smith: If the Republicans nominate Ken Paxton in Texas, it could give Democrats an opening to win there. But Democrats will have to do something completely different to win there. They’d have to nominate an outsider who can run separate from the Democratic brand and capitalize on this moment against Paxton.
Bruni: Lastly, two questions about the city in which you both live. After getting clobbered in the Democratic primary by Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo is running for mayor as an independent in New York. Is his candidacy under- or overrated? And does it hurt or help the Democratic Party writ large?
Silver: Well, I’m not sure it’s rated very highly. At prediction markets, Cuomo’s chances are around 18 percent. In the handful of post-primary polls we’ve gotten, Mamdani has been pulling only 35 to 40 percent, which suggests some theoretical vulnerability. But New York doesn’t use ranked-choice voting in general elections, and the remaining 60 to 65 percent is being divided up among three very flawed candidates with a lot of overlap in their messages.
As for the effect on the Democratic Party overall — personally, I’m pleased to see some fresher faces in the party, and I’m pleased that these tired political dynasties like the Cuomos and the Clintons are finally being rejected by voters, including in a state that has historically been friendly to them. And I say that as someone who has his fair share of disagreements with Mamdani on economic policy and probably other things. I’m a defender of the median voter theorem, the idea — which in my view is backed by plenty of empirical evidence — that other things being equal, you’ll win more elections by playing to the moderate center. But other things aren’t always equal. If the young talent in the Democratic Party is more on the progressive side, the establishment should be listening to that. Or if they don’t, they won’t be the establishment much longer.
Smith: I don’t know whether it’s under- or overrated, but it’s definitely pathetic. The New York Democratic establishment made a massive mistake in backing him in the primary. I agree with what Nate said above that we shouldn’t read too much into the mayoral results, but one lesson I hope Democrats take from this is that it’s perhaps time for some of these old political dynasties to exit stage left and let a new generation take the reins.
Bruni: Thank you both for your insights.
Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Age of Grievance” and a contributing Opinion writer.
Nate Silver, the founder and former editor of FiveThirtyEight and the author of “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,” writes the newsletter Silver Bulletin.
Lis Smith was a senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign and is the author of the memoir “Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story.”
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Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Age of Grievance” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter. Instagram Threads @FrankBruni • Facebook
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