CNN
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The sweeping Republican budget bill advancing through Congress illuminates the central fault line in the modern GOP electoral coalition more starkly than any legislation in decades.
The bill sharpens the GOP’s long-standing tension between a political strategy that increasingly relies on financially squeezed working-class voters and an economic agenda that still funnels its greatest direct benefits to the affluent. The budget legislation makes that conflict unusually explicit because, for the first time in 30 years, the GOP has tied large spending cuts that will mostly hurt families below the median income in the same bill with big tax cuts that mostly benefit families above it.
In the past, Republican tax bills “where the benefits were more tilted toward the rich were not uncommon,” said Harris Eppsteiner, associate director for economic analysis for the Budget Lab at Yale University. “But the thing that is unique here is that it is paired to cuts in the safety net that will leave folks at the bottom worse off.”
More than any other single factor, Democrats are counting on a voter backlash against the budget bill — which passed the House earlier this month and is moving toward a floor vote maybe as soon as this week in the Senate — to power them to gains in the 2026 midterm elections.
“It’s a powerful thing to be able to say they are cutting Medicaid and people’s health care, popular programs, to fund a tax cut for the wealthiest people,” said Nick Gourevitch, a Democratic pollster.
Congressional Republicans are already trying to build defenses against that argument. They are highlighting the aspects of the tax plan with the broadest populist appeal and presenting the bill’s substantial cuts in Medicaid spending as a form of welfare reform that will preserve benefits for the neediest. Since the Ronald Reagan era, Republicans also have consistently shown that they can neutralize Democratic economic appeals to White blue-collar voters by painting the party as excessively liberal on cultural issues such as crime, immigration and LGBTQ rights.
Yet the magnitude of what Republicans are attempting with this single bill will test that record. Simultaneously, according to nonpartisan analyses, the bill could strip health insurance from at least 16 million Americans and significantly cut food assistance — while also providing tax cuts worth over $100,000 annually to the top 0.1% of earners. Bobby Kogan, a former Senate Budget Committee aide who now analyzes fiscal policy at the liberal Center for American Progress, says that considering all its provisions, the legislation “would be the biggest transfer from the poor to the rich in a single bill in US history.”
An early skirmish between Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska and a liberal advocacy group is previewing how the debate may play out next year over what Republicans, adopting President Trump’s terminology, are calling their “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
Unrig the Economy, the liberal advocacy group, has run radio and television ads in Bacon’s Omaha district attacking him over his vote supporting the budget bill when it passed the House in May. “He’s actually cutting Medicaid so he can give tax breaks to big corporations and billionaires,” an Omaha woman identified as Audrey declares in the television ad.
The argument that Republicans are taking health care from people who need it to fund tax cuts for people who don’t is likely to be central in Democratic House and Senate campaigns next year. “It is key that both House and Senate Democrats continue to implement this message as far and wide as possible,” the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee wrote in a strategy memo released earlier this month.
Bacon, one of just three House Republicans left in districts that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, has previewed the likely GOP response to those arguments in his pushback against the advocacy group’s ads. He’s emphasized the portion of the bill’s Medicaid changes adding work requirements. “We expect if you’re an able-bodied adult without children that you should be seeking a job or getting the skills to get another job or as a minimum, volunteering 20 hours a week,” Bacon said in a press call with local reporters earlier this month.
Republicans yoked the tax and spending cuts into one bill largely to satisfy hardline House conservatives who were complaining that the tax plan dangerously inflated the federal deficit and debt.
But in choosing to pair the tax and spending cuts, the GOP conspicuously departed from its strategy for the tax cuts it passed under Presidents George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003 and Trump in 2017. Each of those bills offered sugar without spinach: They cut taxes without reducing spending. The last time the GOP pursued tax and spending cuts in the same bill was in 1995, when the aggressive “Republican Revolution” Congress led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich precipitated an intense fiscal battle with then-President Bill Clinton.
In the debates over the earlier GOP tax cuts, Democrats argued that the plans primarily benefited the rich and, by depleting federal revenues, would eventually force cuts in programs for average families. But by choosing to cut taxes and programs simultaneously, Republicans this year have eliminated any conjecture, allowing analysts to assess the plan’s combined impact on families at different points on the income scale.
Those analyses have returned a consistent verdict on the bill’s winners and losers. Both the Congressional Budget Office and the budget model developed by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, found that families on the lowest rungs of the income ladder would lose more from the spending cuts than they would gain from the tax savings; the CBO calculated that most families earning up to about $76,000 annually would come out net losers from the bill. Middle-to upper middle-class families, both analyses found, would see relatively small net benefits. Only those at the top would see big gains: CBO calculated the top 10% of earners would average about $12,000 in additional annual income from the bill, while the Penn Wharton model found that the top 0.1% would net over $103,000 annually.
Kogan said that no previous legislation careened to such extremes on both ends. He’s calculated that compared with the “One Big Beautiful Bill” the 1995 Gingrich budget sought deeper cuts in programs for the needy but didn’t provide such generous tax breaks to the rich; the famous 1981 Reagan budget plan (which was separated into two bills) cut taxes more for the rich, but programs for the poor less. With bigger program cuts than Reagan and bigger tax cuts than Gingrich, Kogan says, this bill redistributes wealth up the income ladder more than either of them.
When congressional Republicans previously married tax and spending cuts into a single bill did not end well for them. In that 1995 confrontation, Clinton won the battle for public opinion, reviving his foundering presidency and propelling him toward an easy reelection in 1996. Clinton prevailed by stressing the argument Democrats are echoing today: Republicans are cutting programs that benefit average Americans to fund tax cuts for the rich.
As in 1995, the GOP budget plan is facing widespread public skepticism. Substantially more Americans said they opposed than supported the bill in recent national polls by the non-partisan Pew Research Center and KFF thinktank, as well as in Washington Post/Ipsos, Fox News, and Quinnipiac University surveys.
Though the Senate is considering changes to the House-passed legislation, both bills are built around the same two pillars: extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts for all earners and offsetting that cost primarily by cutting federal spending on Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
Both of those pillars stand on shaky ground with the public. In the Washington Post/Ipsos survey, a majority of Americans opposed extending the tax cuts for those earning over $400,000 annually. Both that survey and the KFF poll also found that significant majorities opposed health care cuts that would cause a significant rise in the uninsured. Only about 1 in 5 in the KFF poll said they expected the bill to help the middle-class; half thought it would hurt average families.
The GOP’s challenge in selling this package is even more complicated than in 1995 because of changes in their electoral coalition. Compared with that era, Republicans today are much more reliant on working-class voters without a four-year degree — not only the white voters in that category, but also increasingly the blue-collar minorities who provided Trump’s most important gains in the 2024 election.
That means many more GOP voters than in Gingrich’s time rely on federal safety net programs. Looking at people who have purchased health care through the ACA, KFF found that more identify as Republicans than Democrats. Sixty-four House Republicans represent districts where the share of adults on Medicaid exceeds the national average. Republicans hold 13 Senate seats across the 20 states that have insured the most people under the Medicaid expansion funded by the ACA — which is the principal target for both the House and Senate cuts. Medicaid funding is especially critical to hospitals in rural areas, which now vote overwhelmingly Republican.
Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster, says that targeting federal health care programs for such large reductions dangerously ignores the changes in the GOP’s electoral base since the days when fiscal hawks such as former House Speaker Paul Ryan set the party’s fiscal agenda.
“The GOP coalition is dramatically different today than it was 10 years ago,” Ayres said. “This looks like a bill that could have come out of a Paul Ryan House of Representatives rather than a Donald Trump House of Representatives.”
Neera Tanden, the former chief domestic policy adviser for former President Joe Biden and now the president of the Center for American Progress, frames the mismatch even more starkly: “Republicans are testing the proposition that there is nothing they can do to working class people to make them lose their support,” she said.
Republicans may face particular vulnerability among the newest addition to their coalition: working-class minority voters without a college degree. The Washington Post/Ipsos, Pew and KFF polls all found them expressing much greater concern about the bill than non-college Whites, who have been more solidly cemented into the GOP base for decades. In the KFF poll, over four-fifths of minorities without a college degree said Medicaid was very important to their community and nearly three-fifths said it was very important to their own families — far more than the share of non-college Whites who said the same. In both the KFF and Pew surveys, more than three times as many of those blue-collar minorities said they expected the bill to hurt than to help them.
Against all these headwinds, Republicans have some potentially potent responses. The White House has reportedly shared private polling with congressional Republicans showing support for the bill’s measures to end taxes on tips and overtime, and is also urging them to stress the plan’s provisions punishing states that provide Medicaid to undocumented immigrants. In the KFF poll, two-thirds of Americans backed a work requirement for able-bodied adults receiving Medicaid, another central component of the GOP plan. Most voters were likewise receptive to the GOP case that reducing Medicaid spending on those adults would save money for the elderly, low-income children and people with disabilities.
Jason Cabel Roe, a Michigan-based Republican consultant, believes that it would have been better for the party to split the tax and spending cuts into separate bills, partly to make it harder for Democrats to link the two. But Roe believes public concern about the federal deficit and debt gives Republicans more leeway than Democrats believe to cut government programs — as long as the targets look justified.
“Our argument is we are going to get people off the dole who don’t belong there … and if we are able to find the savings through that strategy, I think we can weather this line of attack from Democrats,” he said. “If there are real stories of people losing their Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans benefits, then we have a problem .”
Yet as KFF President Drew Altman wrote last week, the KFF poll also found that many voters were moved by Democratic counter-arguments, such as pointing out that most Medicaid recipients are already working, disabled, or caring for a family member. Gourevitch and other Democratic strategists believe the party’s enduring advantage on health care — one of the few issues on which the public consistently expresses more confidence in Democrats than Republicans — will give an advantage to their candidates in any campaign exchanges over the bill.
As Tanden pointed out, voters react to changes in health care policy more viscerally than most issues — a dynamic that has previously burned both parties. Revoking health insurance for millions of Americans would be a tough sell for the GOP at any point. But Republicans are creating a much more volatile compound by adding to the formula tax savings for the affluent that make the distribution of winners and losers in their plan unusually visible. “They are playing with live bombs here,” Tanden said.
