Analysis: How Trump's ‘big, beautiful bill' frames the defining debate for 2026

CNN

a day ago

The massive tax and budget bill President Donald Trump signed into law this month could prove a major challenge for Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections — but probably not in the places that will be hurt the most by it.
Democrats still expect to compete in very few of the House districts that face the greatest losses from the bill's historic cuts to the Medicaid program. The same is true in the districts with the most to lose from the bill's cancellation of the tax incentives for clean energy manufacturing approved under President Joe Biden. Many of the most exposed districts in both categories are small-town and exurban places where the cultural hurdles for Democrats remain nearly insurmountable, even after the passage of a bill that could so directly harm their economic interests.
Instead, the sweeping policy bill may threaten Republicans more in places that are offended than affected by it. That includes not only suburban seats with large numbers of college-educated voters who tend to support activist government, but also blue-collar communities where the bill's cuts to the social safety net may help Democrats win back some of the working-class voters of all races who have moved away from them in the Trump era.
'This is the fight for this election: Can we convince blue-collar voters in particular that the Republicans just screwed them in order to give tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires?' said Democratic strategist Mike Lux, who has extensively researched the party's struggles in working-class communities.
Brad Todd, a Republican consultant who co-authored 'The Great Revolt,' a 2018 book about the GOP's gains with working-class voters, says he's confident Republicans can neutralize such arguments by focusing debate on the bill's specifics. Though polling on the bill is now mostly negative, Todd sees great opportunity to expand support, particularly among blue-collar voters, by highlighting its temporary elimination of federal taxes on tips and overtime, and the requirement that able-bodied adults work or perform community service to receive Medicaid. 'Working-class voters who vote Republican believe that (work requirement) is reasonable, and I will litigate that all day long,' said Todd, who is also a CNN contributor.
Democratic pollster Celinda Lake agrees the bill offers Democrats no guarantee they can dig out of their deep image problems. She said that the party's criticism of the legislation may not be as effective as many hope unless voters see Democrats as offering viable alternatives, particularly on the economy.
But, like Lux, Lake believes the Republican choice to link tax and spending cuts so explicitly in the same bill offers Democrats an unparalleled opportunity to win a second look from voters who think they have lost focus on the needs of average families. 'So many of our arguments against Trump, voters don't think personally affect them,' Lake said. 'Now you've got something that personally affects everyone.'
With the energy and health care cuts in this bill, House and Senate Republicans have emphatically renounced one of the most venerable assumptions in Congress: that it is political suicide for legislators to vote against big economic interests in their own communities.
Since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act under Biden in 2022, energy and auto companies have unleashed a torrent of private investment into new clean energy manufacturing facilities, with most of the money and jobs flowing into Republican-leaning House districts. The GOP's budget bill almost completely revoked the Biden tax subsidies that triggered that flow.
Even so, hardly any of the Republicans districts facing the greatest potential losses are on Democratic target lists for 2026. Of the 20 GOP districts that have received the most clean energy investment so far under the Biden-era incentives, only the Michigan seat held by Bill Huizenga might become a Democratic target — and even then, probably only if he vacates it to run for the US Senate.
The risk that companies will cancel investments — costing jobs in the process — is probably even greater in districts where large clean energy projects have been announced but not yet begun. But of the 20 GOP districts with the most clean energy investments pending, only the one held by Rep. Jen Kiggans in southeast Virginia has emerged as a Democratic target.
A similar pattern is apparent in the bill's cuts to Medicaid. A CNN analysis earlier this year found that 64 House Republicans represent districts where the share of Medicaid recipients exceeds the national average of 23.5%. Republicans also hold 11 of the Senate seats in the 15 states that have insured the most people under the ACA's coverage expansion, which is the principal target for the Medicaid cuts imposed by the GOP budget bill. Hospitals in rural areas, where fewer adults receive health care through their employers, are especially vulnerable to the Medicaid cutbacks.
Yet once again, very few of the places most exposed to the bill's cuts are on Democratic priority lists for 2026. House Democrats are targeting California Republican Rep. David Valadao, whose majority-Hispanic Central Valley seat has a higher percentage of people receiving health care through Medicaid (over 60%) than any other Republican-held seat.
Overall, though, just eight of the 64 House Republicans in districts where Medicaid reliance exceeds the national average (including Valadao's) are on the target lists formulated so far by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee or the House Majority PAC, the party's principal outside investor in House contests. More than a dozen House districts where at least 30% of adults rely on Medicaid (including seats now held by Rep. Jay Obernolte, Rep. Hal Rogers and Speaker Mike Johnson) remain far off Democrats' radar.
Democrats will be intently contesting the Senate seat in North Carolina, which ranks 15th among the states that have added the most people through the ACA expansion. (North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis condemned the bill's Medicaid cuts before announcing he would not seek another term after Trump threatened to support a primary challenger.)
But it's unclear how viable a challenge the party can mount next year to Sen. Jon Husted in Ohio, and Democrats are unlikely to seriously compete against Sen. Bill Cassidy in Louisiana or for an open seat in Kentucky, three other states that rank above North Carolina in the number of people insured through the Medicaid expansion.
The problem Democrats face in the districts and states most exposed to the Medicaid and clean energy cuts is that they tend to be heavily blue-collar and lower-income, with a population base centered on exurbs and rural areas. While those are typically the most economically precarious of the places that elect Republicans, they also tend to be among the most receptive to conservative GOP messages on racially inflammatory issues such as immigration and crime, and cultural fights including abortion and LGBTQ rights.
Both the ACA Medicaid expansion and the Biden clean energy incentives showered small town and rural districts with enormous economic benefits. The fact that, even after congressional Republicans voted so unambiguously to revoke many of those benefits, Democrats still don't see a way to contest those seats underscores the nearly impregnable cultural obstacles confronting the party outside of the nation's major metro areas.
Even if the reliably red places hit hardest by the bill's cuts remain beyond their reach, Democrats are confident the legislation will improve their prospects in the more politically marginal places they already hoped to contest next year.
Democratic strategists expect the rollback of the clean energy tax incentives mostly to play a supporting role in their 2024 messaging, centering on the argument that ending the subsidies will raise electricity prices. (The repeal will feature more prominently in a handful of Republican-held swing districts, including Kiggans' and Rep. Gabe Evans' in Colorado, where projects may be canceled.)
But Democrats are clearly hoping to focus their 2026 messaging in districts everywhere around the bill's core element: the provisions that cut more than $1 trillion in federal spending on health care programs that benefit middle- and working-class families to help fund tax cuts that all analyses have shown provide their greatest benefits to the affluent.
'Cuts to health care and nutrition would be damning under any circumstances, but they are doubly damning because they are occurring in the same legislation that is spending a fortune on giving the wealthiest Americans more tax cuts,' said Democratic pollster Geoff Garin.
Public polling has consistently found that most Americans oppose the bill, often by large majorities; one political scientist has calculated that the budget bill is more unpopular than any proposed legislation since 1990 except the GOP's 2017 attempt to repeal the ACA.
To Democrats, and even some Republicans, the biggest risk for the GOP in the legislation is that it reflects an anachronistic view of the party's changing coalition. In its broad outlines, this bill followed the tracks of previous Republican budgets passed under President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The difference is that today 'there are so many new Trump supporters who are non-college-educated and lower on the socioeconomic scale, and they could very well have their health care coverage through Medicaid, especially in rural areas,' said GOP pollster Whit Ayres.
That dynamic, again, likely won't be sufficient to put into play the deeply conservative Republican-held districts most reliant on Medicaid. But if even a smaller number of ordinarily Republican-leaning Medicaid recipients switch their votes, that might be enough to tip the more competitive races Democrats are targeting, Garin pointed out. Medicaid covers about one-fifth of the population in many of the House districts that Democrats are planning to contest — below the national average, but still considerable.
The bigger danger for Republicans may not be voters who personally rely on the program, but those who object to cutting it anyway, either because they believe they may need it someday or because they philosophically object to the bill's central trade-off. 'The idea that you are going to take away people's health care so Elon Musk gets millions of dollars in tax relief — that just drives people nuts,' Lux said.
Polling suggests that equation could especially alienate two critical segments of the GOP's Trump-era coalition.
One is white women without a college degree. Those women have mostly voted Republican for years, but they also have displayed more concern than the men in their lives about protecting the social safety net, particularly with regard to health care.
It's likely no coincidence that Democrats ran slightly better with these women in House races in 2018 — the first election after the GOP's attempt to repeal the ACA — than they did in any of the House elections immediately before or after that, according to both the exit polls and analysis by Catalist, a Democratic voter targeting firm. In polling this spring by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, twice as many of those working-class white women said they believed the bill would hurt rather than help people like them, according to previously unpublished results provided to CNN.
The other group that may be especially dubious of the bill were the most important new addition to Trump's 2024 coalition: minority voters without a four-year college degree. In the Pew polling, blue-collar minority men said they thought the bill would hurt, rather than help, people like them by more than 2 to 1; minority women without a college degree expressed that negative view by more than 4 to 1.
Another other potential source of vulnerability for the GOP is that New York, California, Michigan and Pennsylvania, all states with Democratic governors, account for nearly one-third of all Republican House seats that Democrats are targeting. Those governors could be particularly credible messengers amplifying the case against the social welfare cuts, particularly to Medicaid. Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro may have cut the template by repeatedly arguing across Pennsylvania that the state cannot replace the Medicaid funds it will lose under the bill and thus will be forced to reduce services. 'The cuts that are about to come are … a direct result of how your federal representatives voted here,' Shapiro said after the bill passed. 'We can't fix this for them.'
Todd, though, sees much in the bill that Republicans can use to solidify their increasingly working-class base. 'There's plenty in here that reflects the changing (Republican) coalition,' he said.
The temporary tax breaks for tips and overtime, expanded child tax credit and new provision temporarily allowing the deduction of interest on car loans will help rebut Democratic charges that the measure favors the rich, Todd said. And he predicts that support for the specific change of requiring work for Medicaid recipients will outweigh the general public resistance to cutting the program.
Republicans also believe that Democratic attacks on the Medicaid changes will be blunted because the most significant reductions won't go into effect until after the 2026 election —a point that also concerns some Democratic strategists. But other Democrats point out that voters in the 2018 election punished Republicans for merely attempting an ACA repeal that passed the House but never became law. However visible the Medicaid cuts are by next year, Garin says, 'this is also very much a values issue.'
That insight may be the key to understanding how the budget bill could reverberate through the 2026 election. Republicans think they can define it as advancing values they have long touted, particularly rewarding work through lower taxes and requiring work from those receiving government benefits. Democrats, in turn, are hopeful the debate over the bill will portray them as resolute defenders of average families and Republicans as champions of the wealthy and big corporations — restoring a traditional political framing that has blurred during the Trump years. Both parties will be aiming their arguments at far more than just the voters — and the places — that the bill will touch most directly.