The 2026 midterm elections are still far into the future, but Republicans are placing a big and risky bet that they can survive the coming attacks on President Donald Trump’s spending and tax cut bill and the potential impact of his erratic tariff policies. History is not on their side.
The ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ is a big risk for House Republicans. Many of them hope otherwise.
As the 2026 midterms loom, voters are restless and eager to penalize those in power. Every election starting with 2006, with the exception of 2012, has been a change election.
May 25, 2025 The Washington Post
Analysis by Dan Balz
For Trump, the bill is something of an everything bagel, a package well-stuffed with items large and small. Republicans know the bill could amount to the entirety of his legislative agenda this year and next. The president prefers executive actions to legislative sausage-making. Some things — the setting of tax rates or the contours of Medicaid eligibility, for example — depend on the work of Congress.
The bill would extend individual and corporate tax cuts approved during Trump’s first term, add campaign promises to eliminate taxes on tips and overtime, lift the state and local tax (SALT) cap, and make a variety of other changes, such as adding about $150 billion for border security. It would cut about $700 billion from projected Medicaid spending over the next decade, in large part through new work and reporting requirements for recipients. About $280 billion would be cut from the food stamp program, with new work requirements added.
The Congressional Budget Office reports that those in the lowest 10 percent of the income scale would see their resources reduced while those in the highest 10 percent would see them increased.
Various estimates say the measure would add about $3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, a bitter pill for deficit-conscious Republicans. The bond markets have responded poorly.
Trump claimed on his social media site, Truth Social, that the measure “is arguably the most significant piece of Legislation that will ever be signed in the History of our Country.” His sense of history lacks a sense of history.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) has said failure to pass the bill is not an option. Republicans with reservations about the final product will probably swallow their objections and vote yes on final passage sometime this summer.
The battle will gain in intensity at that point, but the first volleys were sounded this past week, and two veterans of political campaigns were quick to join the fray: Republican Karl Rove, who helped guide George W. Bush to a pair of presidential victories, and Democrat Rahm Emanuel, whose résumé includes service in the House and as White House chief of staff, mayor of Chicago and ambassador to Japan.
Emanuel, writing in The Washington Post, said Republicans have handed Democrats a political gift, if they can take advantage of it. The pending legislation, he wrote, “should be understood by the public in one phrase: ‘tax cuts for the wealthy, health-care cuts for the many.’ The simplicity of that binary is its virtue.”
The Trump presidency and congressional Republicans, he argued, “are beacons of the three C’s: corruption, chaos and cruelty,” adding that the new bill “is the ripest opportunity we’ll have to lift the fog that can define 2026.” The fog, in this case, is the nonstop flurry of actions by the president that are so many and so often that the public can barely digest it all.
Rove, writing in the Wall Street Journal, warned Republicans not to duck a debate about Medicaid. He said they should lean in. “GOP silence will make the inevitable Democratic assault more powerful,” he wrote. Republicans, he said, should promote the new work requirements, which he said are popular with most Americans, and hammer Democrats for failing to root out fraud in the program.
Many Republican strategists share Rove’s view about being aggressive. “GOP needs to go on unified offense — now, do not wait for 2026,” Republican strategist Kristin Davison wrote in an email. “There’s good stuff in the big, beautiful bill, things Americans voted for, and there are positives on the tariff front. Democrats still don’t have their act together — it’s a gift for GOP.”
Offering a counter, Republican pollster Whit Ayres sounded worried about the way the landscape looks at this point. “Let’s see,” he wrote in a message. “Higher prices as a result of tariffs, and millions of Trump voters losing their Medicaid-funded health care. I think even the Democrats might be able to do something with that.”
The 2017 tax cuts played at best a minimal role in the 2018 elections. That could be the case with the current legislation. Brent Buchanan, a GOP pollster, said he believes tariffs and the tax bill will have faded from memory by the time of the midterms. If he is correct, “Republicans can run on the fact that they did what they promised during the 2024 campaign,” he said in a message.
Corry Bliss, another GOP strategist, said Republicans have a better chance to persuade voters of the success of their program than President Joe Biden did with his because they are doing what they said they would do legislatively and because Trump is a more effective communicator.
House Republicans know that political history is not on their side as they look ahead to 2026, if only because the party that holds the White House invariably loses House seats in the midterm following a presidential election.
Beyond that, voters are restless and always eager to penalize those in power. Every election starting with 2006, with the exception of 2012, has been a change election, with a shift in power in the House, Senate or White House. Democrats won the House in 2006 and lost it in 2010, won it back in 2018 and lost it in 2022. The Senate flipped from Republican to Democratic in 2006, back to Republican in 2014, from Republican to Democratic in 2020 and back to the GOP last year. Since 2012, the White House has toggled from Barack Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump.
Heading to 2026, Senate Republicans are on firmer ground than their counterparts in the House. The Senate GOP holds a three-seat margin, and the voting patterns of the 50 states give the GOP a leg up in Senate elections simply because there are more red states than blue states and votes for senators are closely aligned with votes for president. Additionally, the 2026 map of Senate races, in which one-third of seats will be up for election, makes the Democrats’ chances that much more difficult.
House Democrats need to flip just three seats to reclaim the majority, and the average shift of House seats in midterm elections is well above that number. But it’s also true that just three Republicans are sitting in districts won by former vice president Kamala Harris last year. Also, the overall number of competitive seats has declined compared with a decade or two ago. This points to the role that trench warfare, and not just the mood of the country, will play in the battle for control of the House.
House Republicans don’t have much margin for error but are not without some reasons for hope. It would be demoralizing for Democrats, given history and the GOP’s slender majority, for the minority party not to win back the House next year. But the Democrats are a party in disarray, which gives Republican leaders and strategists a sliver of optimism that 2026 may not be their undoing.
Trump is keeping many campaign promises, but the scope of his agenda has gone beyond what many voters expected, as has the disruption it has caused. Consumer confidence is down, independent voters have a negative view of Trump’s job performance, and his agenda for retribution competes for attention with the GOP’s economic agenda. If the 2026 midterm is a referendum on the president, the “Big Beautiful Bill” will be just one data point on which voters will decide the outcome — and it’s hardly a given that it will boost the Republicans.