
Why Trump’s Bill Might Not Be the Elixir Dems Imagined
Democrats’ initial optimism is fading as the bill’s political reality sets in.
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY has serious problems on its hands. This newsletter has covered them.
The party’s approval rating is at record lows; its own voters have little faith in leadership; and a challenging Senate map along with looming census changes will only make winning elections harder. The list goes on—but we won’t.
Against that morose backdrop, last week felt fundamentally different. Yes, the passage of President Donald Trump’s massive budget law was a setback for Democratic priorities—from the cause of public health to the fights for tax fairness and against malnutrition. But as a narrow electoral matter, the “Big Beautiful Bill” was a big political gift.
The bill’s polling is toxic. And the prospect of spending the next sixteen months attacking Republicans for voting to cut Medicaid and food-assistance programs, all to give tax breaks to the ultra-rich, is deeply enticing. Democratic operatives, for the first time since the election, were discussing whether they could flip the Senate by winning seats in red states like Nebraska and Alaska. And, frankly, it didn’t feel like total delusion.
That sense of opportunity, while not entirely gone, has clearly begun to fade. The euphoria Democratic leaders felt is now colored by fear that Republicans may not pay that steep a political price for the bill—or, rather, that focusing campaigns on the law may not be as surefire a strategy as they hoped.
Driving the change in mood are two factors. The first is how the bill itself is structured. The most politically toxic policy changes, like the cuts to Medicaid, won’t be fully implemented until after the midterm elections, while the more popular elements—such as $1,000 investment accounts for newborn children—will go into effect immediately. Some Democrats are concerned that their posture could alienate those parents aided by the new accounts.
“It’s a very clever bill. And I really worry about voters ultimately concluding, ‘Well, Democrats cry wolf again,’” said Celinda Lake, a top Democratic pollster.
Democratic officials are also concerned that the party has failed to present its own policy alternative. They worry that it’s not enough for Democrats to say, ‘We’re not Trump’—or, in this case, ‘We will undo the damage Trump did’—and expect that voters will instinctively reward them for that. In their greatest moments of despair, they wonder if the party may fumble the midterms because of a misreading of this moment.
“You can’t beat something with nothing,” warned Lake. “It’s not a foregone conclusion at all that we will win back the House. These seats are very difficult.”
Some of this looks to me like political scar tissue. One of the key lessons party leaders took from the 2024 election was that Democrats did a poor job explaining to voters what they believed in—let alone outlining a compelling economic agenda that would attract their support. For that reason, some strategists view Trump’s tax bill not as a target to attack but as an opportunity to offer an alternative vision.
“We have to figure out how to expand our brand in places that we’re losing, and that is a process that’s not going to happen overnight. So for me, the conversation around the ‘big beautiful bill’ and offering an alternative is as much about us restating our place as a party that fights for working families and the middle class,” said Steve Schale, a Florida-based Democratic operative, who added that it was a “missed opportunity” for Democrats to not put forward their own plan for cutting costs.
“I’m not that convinced that a lot of pieces of this bill are actually going to be that unpopular,” Schale lamented. “It’s not as black-and-white as I think some in D.C. feel like it’s going to be.”
WE’RE STILL A YEAR AND A HALF OUT from the midterms, so it’s worth acknowledging a few variables at this point. The first is, we don’t know what we don’t know. When Joe Biden passed his big COVID relief bill early in his presidency, the conventional wisdom held that the stimulus money would endear him to voters, and that Republicans would pay a price for not supporting it.
“They’ll get no credit” for those $1,400 checks, one senior administration official predicted at the time. “They’ll get no credit.”
Not only did the Republicans not need credit—Biden didn’t really get any.
The other variable to consider is that Democrats often tend to overthink things. An opposition party can (and probably should) present a galvanizing agenda. Certainly that was the lesson from 1994 and even 2010. But is it entirely necessary? Can you name the planks that Democrats ran on in 2018 other than having protected Obamacare from Trump’s efforts to repeal it?
For now, Democrats are focusing their ad campaigns and public comments on slamming Trump’s bill for its cuts to Medicaid, the impact it will have on rural hospitals, and other health care-related costs.
But in some corners, efforts have begun to help the party fill out the ‘What we will do’ part of the pitch to voters. Stef Feldman, a senior adviser in the Biden White House, posted a Substack piece on Wednesday arguing that Democrats “need to develop exciting, new policy ideas to win future elections.” In an article today for The Bulwark, Zeke Emanuel, Biden’s former pandemic adviser, argued that rather than “demand the reversal of Trump’s bill, Democrats must propose clear reforms to both Medicaid and the ACA.” He suggested seven pillars for a future health care reform effort that Democrats should embrace as a replacement to the Trump changes to Medicaid.
A handful of Democratic operatives also recently announced they were working on a “Project 2029” policy agenda and other party leaders have warned that without a new agenda, Democrats would fall into the trap of defending the status quo.
“Democrats have to really think about what it looks like if and when we get back in power, to actually start from scratch,” said Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic consultant. “If our response to this is to simply try and go back and do the same thing again, we’re going to wind up in this never-ending doom loop.”
Whatever the thinkers think and the activists urge and the pollsters advise, it still matters what the party’s elected leaders do. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have been gearing up to run against Trump’s bill for months. But there’s a belief among many party leaders that they will resist outlining a clear vision for the future until the 2028 presidential primary is underway. More immediately, they will face the question of whether they want to partner with willing Republicans to sand down some of the harsher elements of the legislation—and whether they might even want to join them in bringing attention to the benefits tucked within it.
The first taste of that came at an event hosted by Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley on Tuesday to celebrate an item included in the megabill—compensation for survivors of nuclear radiation. The senator was, quite notably, joined by Democratic Rep. Wesley Bell and former Democratic Rep. Cori Bush.
🫏 Donkey Business:
— At some point the Biden White House drama will come to an end and we can all move on. Unfortunately, we are not yet there. The New York Times’s Tyler Pager wrote this week about his experience coauthoring a book about the 2024 election and trying to land an interview with Biden after the election. Pager got Biden’s cell phone number, gave him a call, and asked him a few questions before Biden had to hang up to catch a train. Normal reporting stuff.
Yet somehow that resulted in Biden’s aides screaming at Pager and frantically texting him, trying to determine how he got the former president’s number. According to Pager, when he tried calling Biden back a few days later, his voicemail greeting had been replaced by a message from Verizon Wireless notifying him that the “number you dialed has been changed, disconnected, or is no longer in service.”
I know it’s too late now, but it should have been clear to the Biden team that he could not simultaneously have been 100 percent capable of serving another term as president and incapable of answering a few questions from a reporter.
— When a Bulwark colleague first dropped a link in our Slack earlier this week to an Instagram post from Rep. Hakeem Jeffries that had clearly been edited to make him look taller, my first instinct was to extend him some grace. Who among us has never dabbled with FaceTune?! Be honest.
But the situation has spiraled out of control. As Juliegrace Brufke, a Capitol Hill reporter, noted today, Jeffries seems to have been photoshopping his fit pics for a while. I hope for his sake someone on the Dems’ digital staff has given him (or his staff) a FaceTune tutorial by now.
My open tabs:
— I Fought Plastic. Plastic Won.
— The People Who Brought You Bill Clinton Want to Introduce You to the ‘Colorado Way’
Lauren, you haven’t been here for long, but the fact you always find and emphasize the negatives when it comes to the Democratic Party, is wearing thin.
Mix it up a bit.
Sure because there is nothing to run on except this toxic bill. The cuts to govt are only beginning to be felt and the concentration camps are only beginning to be built. But hey, the GOP won’t pay a price. Not to mention the price of tariffs. But sure people will like this bill. Come on.
Lauren couldn’t consistently write worse things about Dems if she were on the GOP payroll.