Piercing through the Democratic talking points won’t be easy.
L ongtime Trump pollster John McLaughlin gave a frank piece of advice to the president before he was sworn in: Prioritize tax-cut legislation and avoid a repeat of the first few months of his first term, when congressional Republicans tried and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
“We need to get the tax cuts passed first and not do what you did in 2017 where we waited,” McLaughlin recalls telling the president earlier this year, laying blame on then-Speaker Paul Ryan and then-Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell for pushing health care reform eight years ago before that year’s tax-cut bill. “Because if we don’t have a growing economy, we could lose Congress, and if we lose Congress, we get impeached.”
After a fraught negotiation process, the president’s top White House and political aides got what they wanted on the reconciliation front — a bill to extend his 2017 tax cuts, beef up border and defense spending, and enact temporary tax exemptions for tips, overtime pay, and loan interest for American-made cars.
Now the GOP must convince the American people they should electorally reward congressional Republicans for passing it. Piercing through the Democratic talking points won’t be easy.
For months, Democrats have characterized the bill’s modest entitlement reforms as a pernicious GOP scheme to slash food assistance and Medicaid benefits from the needy to offset tax cuts for billionaires. That’s on top of Democrats’ weeks-long effort excoriating Republicans for the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files — a surprise side issue that Democrats hope will undercut the GOP’s legislative messaging strategy this August recess.
Those attacks have been effective. The Trump administration is “having a hard time” breaking through the media echo chamber on the legislative messaging front surrounding the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” McLaughin told National Review. He cited his own firm’s mid-July polling showing that Americans are evenly split on whether they think the “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill is more of a “spending bill” or a “tax cut bill” based on what they’ve “seen or heard in the media.” That same poll of 1,000 general election voters suggests that the GOP has work to do on the persuasion front, considering only 44 percent of those surveyed said they support the bill and 42 percent oppose it.
A recent Wall Street Journal poll of 1,500 registered voters painted an even worse picture of voter sentiment surrounding the GOP-drafted legislation, with 52 percent of those surveyed opposing the bill and just 42 supporting it. A whopping 70 percent of survey respondents believe the bill will help the wealthy.
McLaughlin says the challenge for Republicans is figuring out how to crack the left-leaning media echo chamber. “If you’re in the right-of-center ecosphere, you’re getting the good news. If you’re in the left of center, you’re really being told opposite things. And the people in the middle that aren’t paying attention, they need to be educated,” he said.
“During the campaign, we broke through that” media echo chamber, he added. “But now we’re not.”
Holding the House GOP’s narrow majority in 2026 will be difficult considering midterm elections traditionally hurt the party in power. The president and his aides are mindful that if Democrats flip the House, they’re likely to impeach him for a third time. That would be a politically fraught and arduous process as Trump looks to cement his second-term legacy, even if House Democrats can’t find enough votes in the upper chamber to convict.
To stave off Democratic arguments surrounding Medicaid, House GOP leaders are urging their members to remind voters that Democrats voted against increased border-security funding and the president’s populist tax policies. They’re also urging members to say that they voted to “strengthen Medicaid” with new work requirements and eligibility checks.
“Democrats are fearmongering about Republican efforts to strengthen Medicaid, but we can’t let them control the narrative,” the House Republican campaign arm said in a memo published last week.
For all their divisions, Democrats are incredibly united in their talking points surrounding the reconciliation bill. “They’re very methodical about it,” Speaker Mike Johnson said during a recent X Spaces conversation with conservative media personality Nick Sortor. “They’re very consistent, and they’re out trying to convince people of something that is just simply not true.”
“The truth is on our side, and we can’t wait to go sell that product,” he added.
Republicans in swing districts are taking credit for a Senate-drafted $50 billion rural hospital fund to ease the legislation’s impact on medical providers.
Senate Republicans are expected to hold on to their majority in 2026 but could face tough primary and general election contests in Republican-held Maine, Texas, and North Carolina, as well as Democrat-held battlegrounds Michigan and Georgia.
On July 8, the National Republican Senatorial Committee arm sent a memo to Senate Republican chiefs of staff and communications staffers urging them to highlight over August recess the “stories of everyday Americans” who will benefit from the best-polling aspects of the bill, such as its border-security funding and tax-cut measures. The memo advises Senate Republicans to host roundtables and business visits highlighting service workers and first responders who will benefit from the bill’s temporary tax-free-tip and overtime pay policies, as well as “working parents and caretakers who benefit from increased tax credits for child and dependent care.”
A little more than a year out from the 2026 midterms, Republicans have a tough road ahead on the campaign front.
“We’re in the resource accumulation phase right now, and we haven’t hit the persuasion phase yet,” McLaughlin said.