Earlier this summer, Republican lawmakers gathered around Donald Trump and applauded as he sat before a desk outside the White House and put his signature on what he calls his “one, big, beautiful bill”.
But there were few claps for Mike Flood this week when the Republican congressman appeared before an auditorium of his Nebraska constituents to extol the tax and spending legislation’s benefits – just boos and jeers.
“From where I sit, there’s been a lot of misinformation out there about the bill,” Flood said, as the audience – some of whom had been encouraged to attend by local Democrats – howled.
“If you are able to work, and you’re able-bodied, you have to work. If you choose not to work, you do not get free healthcare,” Flood later said, diving into the bill’s controversial imposition of work requirements for many enrollees of Medicaid, the healthcare program for poor and disabled Americans. The heckling only intensified.
Trump’s bill is looming large over senators and representative of both parties as they disperse across the country for Congress’s August recess. Signed by Trump on the Fourth of July holiday, the sprawling piece of legislation extends lower tax rates enacted during his first term, creates new exemptions aimed at working-class voters, and funds his plans for mass deportations of immigrants.
Republicans see it as the epitome of the president’s “promises made, promises kept” mantra, while for Democrats, it presents an opportunity to return from the political wilderness voters banished them to in last year’s elections.
Central to their pitch is the bill’s cuts to Medicaid and other safety net programs, its enactment of tax provisions from which the wealthy are expected to see the most benefit, and its overall price tag, which is expected to rise to $3.4tn over the next 10 years.
Democrats also plan to campaign on what the bill does not do. The Republicans who wrote it declined to use the opportunity to extend subsidies for premiums paid by people who receive insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – meaning millions of Americans may find healthcare unaffordable when they expire at the end of the year.
“Between the Medicaid cuts and the ACA cuts, our hospitals are looking at a real phenomenon of people walking into their ERs with no insurance,” the Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin said this week during a town hall in Michigan – a state Trump won last year.
“When you get that letter, when it arrives in your post box, I want you to understand that that increase to your private insurance is because of the cuts that Donald Trump has decided to make just in the past month here, OK. There is a cause and effect.”
Republicans, only a handful of whom have held town halls since the recess began, argue that it is Democrats who will be facing tough questions back home for their unanimous rejection of the bill. Voters will be won over by the legislation’s tax relief for tips, overtime and interest on American cars, larger deductions for taxpayers aged 65 and up, and expansion of immigration enforcement, the party believes, while Medicaid and Snap will ultimately benefit because the measure, they claim, weeds out “waste, fraud and abuse” through stricter work requirements and eligibility checks.
“Republicans are putting working-class Americans first. The one big beautiful bill set that image in concrete for the 2026 midterms, putting Republicans on offense and giving voters a clear, commonsense contrast,” the National Republican Congressional Committee said in a memo. The group has named 26 House districts where it believes Republicans can win, while its adversary, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), is targeting 35 seats.
The main battle next year will be for control of the House of Representatives, which the GOP controls by a margin that is expected to shrink to just three seats once recently created vacancies are filled.
Democrats see reasons to believe their strategy of campaigning against the bill is sound. Recent polls from KFF and Quinnipiac University show that the legislation is unpopular, while Trump is seeing his own approval ratings slump. The GOP is also grappling from the messy fallout caused by Trump supporters’ demands for the release of files related to the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Yet some in the party say making their case will be tricky because of how the measure is written. While it mandates the largest cuts in history to Medicaid and to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), those mostly go into effect only after election day next year.
“Mission number one for us as Democrats is to be educating voters on the actual impacts of the bill and continuing to call out the Republicans that if it was so important to make these cuts to Medicaid and other programs that are happening basically in two years, why aren’t they doing it now? Why don’t they make it now?” said Jane Kleeb, a vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the party’s leader in Nebraska, where the House seat around Omaha is expected to be the site of a fervid race to replace the retiring Republican Don Bacon.
“We all know the answer, right, because they want to win some of these races in ’26.”
Brian Jackson, the Democratic party chair in Ingham county, Michigan, said he was not concerned about the bill’s timing undermining their case against Tom Barrett, a first-term Republican congressman. In an interview, he described an atmosphere of uncertainty in the swing district created by the looming benefit cuts, Trump’s tariffs and his administration’s freeze of research funding, which has affected the local Michigan State University.
“The concern goes back to the overall culture of fear and unknown, and that just is horrible for the economy, it’s horrible for jobs, the auto industry. So, you know, Medicaid is just one of many symptoms of an out-of-touch Washington and how it impacts people’s day-to-day lives,” he said.
In California’s Kern county, Democrats are gearing up for a campaign against David Valadao, a Republican congressman and resilient opponent whose district has one of the highest rates of Medicaid enrollment in the nation. Though he voted for Trump’s bill after giving mixed messages about its cuts to Medicaid, the local Democratic party chair, Christian Romo, warned that their delayed impact could frustrate the party’s efforts.
“This is going to devastate this community,” Romo said. But with the provisions not taking effect until after the election, “will people actually feel the implications of that? No. So will they remember that Valadao voted yes on that bill? You know, it’s up in the air, and we’ll have to see.”
Top congressional Democrats argue that even if the cuts themselves are delayed, voters will feel their disruptions coming.
“Companies are making decisions because they know there’s going to be less revenue as a result of a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid, the largest Medicaid cut in history of this country,” said Pete Aguilar, the House Democratic caucus chair.
“So, healthcare premiums will rise, that will happen early, insurers will make these decisions as well, and hospitals are going to have to face difficult decisions on what their future looks like.”
Christopher Nicholas, a veteran Republican political consultant based in Pennsylvania, where the DCCC is looking to oust four Republicans, warned that Democrats can’t count on just the Medicaid cuts to get them back to the majority.
“As America continues to stratify, self-select into separate neighborhoods and communities, you’re going to have a lot of those represented by Republicans that don’t have as much exposure to the Medicaid program, and you’re going to have lots of them represented by Democrats in more urban areas that have more exposure to the Medicaid program,” he said.
“I think Democrats are way out of over their skis, thinking that that alone will get them to the promised land next year.”
