Source: Politics<\/p>\n
Democrats believe President Donald Trump\u2019s tax-and-spend megabill gives them a heavy cudgel ahead of the 2026 midterms. Now they have to effectively wield it as they try to reclaim the House.<\/p>\n
Ad-makers have quickly prepped attack ads to air as soon as the holiday weekend is over, including in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. House Democrats are plotting to turn the August recess into the opening salvo of the midterms, including through town halls and organizing programs.<\/p>\n
And Democrats see an opportunity to expand the battleground, going on offense into red areas across the country. The bill that passed Thursday<\/a> has already triggered a spike in candidate interest deep into Trump territory, House Majority PAC said. Separately, Democrats are digging into a round of candidate recruitment targeting a half-dozen House districts Trump won by high single or double digits, according to a person directly familiar with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee\u2019s plan and granted anonymity to describe private conversations. They\u2019re recruiting Democrats to challenge Reps. Ann Wagner of Missouri, Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, Kevin Kiley of California, Nick LaLota of New York and Jeff Crank of Colorado<\/p>\n \u201cThere’s almost nothing about this bill that I’m going [to] have a hard time explaining to the district,\u201d said Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), who represents a district Trump won by 9 points. \u201cThis is a giant tax giveaway to wealthy people. Everyone fucking knows it.\u201d<\/p>\n Democrats\u2019 renewed bravado comes after months in the political wilderness, following sweeping losses across the country last year. And it\u2019s not just the megabill\u2019s consequences that give them electoral hope.<\/p>\n Leading to Thursday\u2019s vote was a series of moves they believe portend success: North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who criticized the bill for its steep Medicaid cuts before voting against it, announced his plans to not seek reelection last weekend<\/a>. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who represents one of the three GOP-held districts that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, also announced his plans to not run for reelection<\/a>. That opened up two top midterm battleground races in one weekend.<\/p>\n Democrats have also been far more in sync with their pushback in recent days after months of struggling to unify around a coherent message during Trump\u2019s second term. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries\u2019 record-setting speech on the House floor Thursday morning mirrored those of several Democratic candidates who mentioned Medicaid cuts in their campaign launches this week.<\/p>\n Next they have to spread the message farther, as polling shows many Americans aren\u2019t yet aware of the megabill and its $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and food assistance programs. And Democrats privately acknowledge that as voters learn more, the party needs to stretch its House battlefield to chart a path back to power.<\/p>\n \u201cNo Democrat is going to nationally define this bill in six weeks, so we have to build a drumbeat. You do that by having 70 to 75 campaigns, because then you\u2019re localizing the attack across the country,\u201d the person directly familiar with the DCCC\u2019s plans said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have that yet. In reality, there are maybe 24 to 30 districts with good campaigns going right now.\u201d<\/p>\n Tina Shah, a doctor who launched her bid against Rep. Tom Kean (R-N.J.)<\/a> this week, attacked Republicans for \u201cgut[ting] Medicaid,\u201d and Matt Maasdam, a former Navy SEAL who is challenging Rep. Tom Barrett (R-Mich.)<\/a>, said \u201cthe price of healthcare is gonna go up \u2026 all to line the pocketbooks of billionaires.\u201d<\/p>\n Some Democratic strategists are urging the party to capitalize on this momentum even more aggressively.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to be doing early, paid communications on this \u2014 not just the same old cable buys, token digital buys in swing districts and press conferences,\u201d said Ian Russell, a Democratic consultant who served as the DCCC\u2019s political director in 2014 and 2016. \u201cDemocrats need to take some risks here, mobilize early, spend money they may not have because voters’ views harden over time, and this is when we can shape it.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2024, Democrats failed to break through with their message after President Joe Biden dug the party into a hole with voters on the economy. Trump successfully cast himself as focused on bringing down costs while painting Kamala Harris as overly obsessed with social issues like protecting transgender people. Harris, for her part, ran a scatter-shot, three-month messaging blitz that jumped from cost-of-living to abortion rights to Trump\u2019s threats to democracy, which ultimately didn\u2019t move voters.<\/p>\n Republicans, for their part, plan to emphasize the megabill\u2019s tax cuts, especially those on tips and overtime, and increased funding for border security. On Medicaid cuts, they hope to neutralize Democrats\u2019 attacks by casting them as reforms: tightened work requirements and efforts to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse, a pair of Medicaid-related changes that generally polls well among voters.<\/p>\n \u201cThis vote cemented House Democrats\u2019 image as elitist, disconnected, snobby, unconcerned with the problems Americans face in their daily lives, and most of all \u2014 out of touch,\u201d said NRCC spokesman Mike Marinella in a statement. \u201cHouse Republicans will be relentless in making this vote the defining issue of 2026, and we will use every tool to show voters that Republicans stood with them while House Democrats sold them out.\u201d<\/p>\n But as Republicans look to sell their bill, public polling on it is bleak. Most Americans disapprove of it, in some polls by a two-to-one margin, according to surveys conducted by Quinnipiac University<\/a>, The Washington Post<\/a>, Pew Research<\/a> and Fox News<\/a>.<\/p>\n Meanwhile a pair of Democratic groups, Priorities USA and Navigator Research, released surveys this week showing majorities of voters aren\u2019t fully aware of the megabill. Nearly half of Americans said they hadn\u2019t heard anything about the bill, according to Priorities USA, a major Democratic super PAC. Of those who had heard about it, only 8 percent said they knew Medicaid cuts were included in the legislation.<\/p>\n Two-thirds of survey respondents who self-identified as passive or avoidant news consumers, the kinds of tuned out and low-information voters Democrats failed to win in 2024, said they knew nothing about the bill.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have a lot more work to do as a party to communicate the impacts of this bill to voters who are tuning out politics,\u201d said Danielle Butterfield, Priorities USA executive director.<\/p>\n Butterfield urged Democrats to \u201cget beyond the stats\u201d and \u201cstart collecting storytellers.\u201d Then, start putting ads online, particularly on YouTube, not just traditional TV ads.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to put a face on this as soon as possible,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Among those potential faces is Nathan Sage, a first-time candidate and Iraq War veteran who is challenging Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst. Sage grew up occasionally relying on food assistance, another program that will be cut in the GOP bill, and has said he\u2019s already hearing from Iowans who \u201cfeel that they were duped into believing the Republican agenda when it first came out, because they were talking about no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime. That’s things that working class people want.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cUntil they start hearing [how it] is actually going to affect them, when they do hear that, that’s when the outrage happens,\u201d Sage said in an interview.<\/p>\n Iowa, once a perennial battleground, is now solidly red, as Democrats have consistently lost white, working class voters there. Sage and Democratic pollster Brian Stryker argued the megabill opens a path to winning them back<\/p>\n The Medicaid cuts \u201cenable us to have an issue that\u2019s salient, substantive that\u2019s on the side of working class people,\u201d Stryker said. In 2024, 49 percent of Medicaid recipients voted for Trump, while 47 percent backed Harris, according to polling from Morning Consult<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI hope that this does wake up the working class, does wake up people to understand \u2014 listen, they don’t care about us,\u201d Sage said, \u201cand the only way that we are ever going to get out of the situation is to elect working class candidates to represent us, to fight for us, because they are us.\u201d<\/p>\n Andrew Howard contributed reporting.\u00a0<\/p>\n