The government shutdown has forced to the surface growing tensions between President Trump’s absolute control of the Republican Party and the pressures created by the conversion of the party of Wall Street and the country club into the party of the working class.
Gone are the days of President Ronald Reagan, when the share of Republicans on welfare or other means-tested programs was negligible, enabling him and a whole generation of conservative leaders from Jesse Helms to Newt Gingrich to make racial cracks. As Reagan did in a 1978 radio broadcast describing a welfare recipient “who has used 127 names so far. Posed as a mother of 14 children at onetime, seven at another, signed up twice with the same caseworker in four days.” Or Helms, who said, during a 1981 Senate Agriculture Committee hearing on food stamps: “Human nature is pretty much the same in the Bronx as it is in Puerto Rico or North Carolina. It’s all right to rip off Uncle Sam because everyone is doing it.”
Move forward 45 years and what do we see? Republicans’ taking the initiative in seeking to protect food stamps, now officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, in the face of a funding cutoff supposedly forced by the government shutdown. The program serves roughly 42 million people.
On Oct. 21, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, introduced the Keep SNAP Funded Act of 2025, cosponsored by 10 Republicans and one Democrat. Since then, the list of cosponsors has grown to 14 Republicans, 13 Democrats and the two independents who caucus with the Democrats.
“This isn’t about politics at all in the end. It’s about who we are,” Hawley wrote in “No American Should Go to Bed Hungry,” a guest essay in this newspaper:
America is a great and wealthy nation, and our most important wealth is our generosity of spirit. We help those in need. We provide for the widow and the orphan. Love of neighbor is part of who we are. The Scripture’s injunction to “remember the poor” is a principle Americans have lived by. It’s time Congress does the same.
On Oct. 24, Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Republican of Iowa, introduced similar legislation in the House, joined by 24 Republican cosponsors. “More than 262,000 Iowans, including 100,000 children, rely on SNAP to put food on the table,” Miller-Meeks declared while introducing the measure. “Iowans cannot afford to be used as leverage in Washington’s political games. This bill ensures families continue to receive the nutrition support they depend on, no matter what happens in Congress.”
At the moment, the SNAP program is in what could be called shutdown limbo. Two federal judges have ordered the administration to fund the program on an emergency basis. On Monday, however, the administration agreed only to provide recipients with partial benefits, without clarifying when even those reduced benefits would be released. The administration also said it would not tap additional money to fund full payments in November.
“Our Government lawyers,” Trump wrote, in a post on Friday on Truth Social,
do not think we have the legal authority to pay SNAP with certain monies we have available, and now two Courts have issued conflicting opinions on what we can and cannot do. I do NOT want Americans to go hungry just because the Radical Democrats refuse to do the right thing and REOPEN THE GOVERNMENT. Therefore, I have instructed our lawyers to ask the Court to clarify how we can legally fund SNAP as soon as possible. It is already delayed enough due to the Democrats keeping the Government closed through the monthly payment date and, even if we get immediate guidance, it will unfortunately be delayed while States get the money out. If we are given the appropriate legal direction by the Court, it will BE MY HONOR to provide the funding, just like I did with Military and Law Enforcement Pay.
Trump’s claim that it would be his honor to provide the funding suggests that the shutdown is forcing Republicans, even Trump, to re-evaluate the party’s fundamental tenets in respect to means-tested programs.
The civil rights movement, and especially the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, polarized the United States, as Democrats became the proponents of initiatives to achieve racial equality, while Republicans won the support of whites opposed to many of the new laws and liberal judicial rulings that accompanied them. Republicans like Reagan and George H.W. Bush capitalized on racial divisions by turning welfare, food stamps, busing and crime into wedge issues that steadily helped push white voters out of the Democratic Party.
In recent years, however — in an intraparty realignment that accelerated with Trump’s rise — the Republicans have shifted to become the party of the white working class, and they have made modest inroads recently among Black and Hispanic workers.
In the process, the Republican Party as a political force has grown more dependent on large numbers of the working poor, low-income men and women over 65 and those with disabilities — all constituencies that make heavy use of food stamps and other means-tested social welfare programs.
In 2023, 42.9 percent of the 22.3 million households receiving food stamps were white (excluding those for whom racial or ethnic data was unavailable); 31.1 percent were Black; and 18.9 percent were Hispanic. There is no publicly available data showing the partisan leanings of such programs as SNAP, WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children) and TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or cash welfare benefits), but if you extrapolate from exit poll data, white Republicans appear to represent a slight plurality of SNAP recipients.
From 1980, the year Reagan was first elected, to 2024, the year Trump was elected for a second time, the overall share of voters without college degrees — pollster shorthand for the working classes — who identified as Republican rose to 44.9 from 30.6 percent, according to American National Election Studies. Over the same 44-year period, the share of noncollege white voters who identified as Republican grew to 61.5 from 34.5 percent.
In a reflection of the changing demographic and ideological character of the Republican Party, a 2020 survey of low-income Americans with household incomes less than 250 percent of official poverty levels revealed surprisingly strong support for SNAP among Republicans.
In “Meeting the Moment: Policy Changes to Strengthen SNAP and Improve Health,” Julia Wolfson, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; Cindy W. Leung, a professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health; and Alyssa Moran, a professor in the department of health policy and management at Hopkins, found that:
Seventy percent or more of relatively poor Republicans supported a 15 percent increase in SNAP benefits, an increase in the minimum SNAP benefit from $16 to $30 a month, allowing the purchase of prepared foods, including sandwiches, with food stamps. Support was higher among Democrats than Republicans, but not by much.
The polling firm that conducts surveys for Trump and other Republicans, Fabrizio-Lee, found support for SNAP among all voters in an April 21-23 poll conducted for the Food Industry Association.
“SNAP,” Fabrizio-Lee concluded, “is very popular across the partisan spectrum, and it would be political malfeasance to try to cut benefits for the program.” Among all voters, 64 percent had a favorable view of the program and 14 percent a negative view; among Republicans, 49 favorable, 24 unfavorable; among independents, 60 to 17; among Democrats, 86 to 4.
Most significant politically, the survey found that a member of the House or a senator “who votes to cut/reduce SNAP benefits would be punished at the polls, with 48 percent less likely to vote for them and just 17 percent more likely.”
SNAP beneficiaries, according to government studies, are overwhelmingly native-born, at 89.4 percent; naturalized citizens make up 6.2 percent. Refugees are at 1.1 percent, and “other noncitizen” are 3.3 percent.
The Fabrizio-Lee data are a setback to conservatives who calculated that many white voters would dismiss concerns over the threatened defunding of food stamps as a loss that did not affect them. Their findings are supported by survey data collected late last month for Navigator Research by the Global Strategy Group, a Democratic firm.
The Navigator survey found that voters have a favorable view of the SNAP program, 78 percent to 15 percent, including Republicans, 67 to 25, and MAGA Republicans, 66 to 28.
Asked “If SNAP, or food stamps, runs out of funding in November due to the government shutdown, who would you blame most?” 46 percent said “Trump and Republicans in Congress,” while 25 percent said they would blame Democrats. Among independent voters, 32 percent said they would blame Trump and Republicans, 7 percent said Democrats, but a 40 percent plurality said they would blame both sides.
The Democrats’ tough stands on health care and nutrition programs during the shutdown appear to have improved the party’s public image, which has been stuck at very low levels since the 2024 election.
The Navigator study found, for example, that from Oct. 13 to Oct. 27, the Democratic one-point advantage over Republicans on the question “Which party is looking out for people like me?” rose to a 10-point advantage. On the question of “acting responsibly,” the Democratic edge grew from one point to seven points. On Oct. 13, Republicans had a seven-point lead on “being fiscally responsible.” By Oct. 27, the parties were tied.
If these findings reflect sustained improvements in the public perception of the Democratic Party — and that’s a big if — they suggest that the party’s adoption of an aggressive defense of food stamps and Obamacare subsidies points a way to pull the party out of its fetid condition.
The weak position of the Democratic Party has been documented in three recent major studies — the Welcome PAC report “Deciding to Win,” Pew Research’s “A Year Ahead of the Midterms, Americans’ Dim Views of Both Parties” and The Working Class Project 2025, a nine-month study of working-class voters by American Bridge.
On Sunday, Politico’s Elena Schneider wrote about the American Bridge study: “Working-class voters see Democrats as ‘woke, weak and out of touch’ and six in 10 have a negative view of the party.”
The feedback, she writes, is grim: Working-class voters don’t see Democrats as strong or patriotic, while Republicans represent safety and strength for them. These voters “can’t name what Democrats stand for, other than being against [Donald] Trump,” according to the report.
The Welcome PAC Deciding to Win study argues:
Since 2012, highly educated staffers, donors, advocacy groups, pundits and elected officials have reshaped the Democratic Party’s agenda, decreasing our party’s focus on the economic issues that are the top concerns of the American people. These same forces have pushed our party to adopt unpopular positions on a number of issues that are important to voters, including immigration and public safety.
In addition, the Welcome PAC report found that voters trust Republicans more than Democrats on the highest-priority issues, including the cost of living, a six-point Republican advantage; inflation, 10 points; taxes and government spending, nine points; national security, nine points; and crime, 13 points.
Welcome PAC found another problem of equal concern to Democratic strategists. On issues once firmly owned by Democrats, the Democratic advantage on trust had shrunk to single digits, sometimes low single digits: health care, a five-point Democratic advantage; Social Security, one point; poverty, three points; Medicare, four points; and housing, two points.
In “Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy,” the coauthors Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown point out that while urban and rural counties relied on government transfer programs at similar rates in the 1970s and 1980s,
They diverged from the 1990s onward as rural places faced economic tumult and residents came to rely more on government benefits. By 2019, the eve of the pandemic, rural people benefited from social transfers by $1,749 more per person per year than their urban peers.
In 1970, Mettler and Brown calculated, rural and urban households received social benefits of $2,220 and $2,244, respectively, a 1.1 percent difference. By 2019, the average annual government benefit for rural residents rose to $10,558 and for urban residents to $8,809, a 20 percent difference.
Mettler and Brown cite research by Jennifer Sherman, a sociologist at Washington State University, to describe the agonized struggle of the rural poor who, when faced with a major economic setback, are forced to turn to government for help:
When they themselves need to use such benefit, they experience a deep sense of stigma and shame. They drove to stores far away to use SNAP benefits, hoping to avoid the gaze of their neighbors and community members.
Given the way people have traditionally talked about these programs, one of the most striking things about government data on SNAP use is just how high the white share of food stamp recipients actually is.
In West Virginia, 97.7 percent of SNAP recipients whose racial and ethnic identity was recorded are white; Indiana, 66 percent; Iowa 75.5 percent; Kentucky, 83.4 percent; Missouri, 67.1 percent; Montana, 76.6 percent; North Dakota, 66.9 percent; Ohio, 64.9; Oklahoma, 60.9 percent; Utah, 86.6 percent; and Wyoming, 78.8 percent.
A less-known complication in the delivery of means-tested programs, including SNAP and Medicaid, is the complex interaction of programs at the state level.
Rita Hamad, a professor of social epidemiology and public policy at Harvard, responded by email to my inquiries:
The states in the Southeast with the highest percent of the population enrolled in SNAP are those with Republican congressional representatives. Their higher SNAP enrollment rates are primarily because these states also have some of the highest poverty rates, including among people of all races and ethnicities. While many states have poverty alleviation programs like the earned-income tax credit and child tax credit to supplement federal anti-poverty programs, these states are more likely to not have such policies in place.
Hamad then pointed to a 2019 paper, “The ‘Undeserving Poor,’ Racial Bias, and Medicaid Coverage of African Americans” by Lonnie Snowden and Genevieve Graaf of the University of Texas, to show how this works in the case of Medicaid and Obamacare in states controlled by conservative Republicans. Snowden and Graaf write:
Under the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, African Americans experienced significant, if less-than-maximum coverage gains. They would have benefited even more from full Medicaid expansion, but African Americans are overrepresented in states that declined expansion.
In view of the generous terms of the federal offer to states, this rejection reflects deep reservations about Medicaid and Medicaid recipients. Critics seek restrictions on coverage for nonelderly, nondisabled adults, partly because Medicaid is viewed as a kind of “welfare” that should be withheld from the “undeserving poor.”
While Trump has signaled that he will at least partially accede to court orders requiring him to fund SNAP, Democrats and other advocates of the poor should not hold their breath. Back at the end of the first Trump administration, Trump and Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, tried to cut more than $180 billion over 10 years from the program; their proposals were dropped once Joe Biden took office. The Republicans’ “big, beautiful bill” did SNAP no favors — in effect, it cut that same $180 billion plus from the program.
In other words, Trump and Vought have not given up their dream of gutting what Trump derisively calls “Democrat programs,” and SNAP, Medicaid and Obamacare rank high on that list. The reality is that despite some of the new proposals coming from their side of the aisle, neither Trump, Vought nor many other Republicans seem to recognize that it is no longer accurate to describe these programs as “Democrat programs.” Whether they will pay a political price for their ignorance is another question.
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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.
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