Betting on appearances over reality is a weak long-term strategy, especially when those appearances are false. Fictions quickly wear thin, allowing people to see through to reality, to facts that stay stubbornly in place.
President Abraham Lincoln put it more pithily: “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
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Today’s Democrats still don’t get that you can’t fool voters indefinitely. They criticize the Medicaid and food stamp reforms President Donald Trump signed into law on Friday as literally deadly. Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL), a former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, told CNN, “The way I can summarize this big, ugly bill best is: Republicans caved, Trump lied, and people will die.”
If that’s the best the party can do, Democrats are in trouble. They are, however, all saying much the same thing. A Democratic campaign official informed me tersely recently on NewsNation that the reforms are “cruel” because “if you’re a single mom and you’re only working 40 hours a month because you’re raising three kids, you don’t get your Medicaid anymore under this bill.”
There are two good answers to that. One is in the old saying, “Hard cases make bad law.” Change always produces winners and losers, but you cannot write sensible social policy if your baseline is that every single, sad, outlier case must be avoided. Minor reforms must be undertaken to stop millions of able-bodied people dipping into taxpayer pockets while the nation hurtles deeper into ruinous debt.
The other answer will be more persuasive to voters. It is that the example of the mother of three losing Medicaid is not true. If a single woman is raising even one small child, the Medicaid reforms don’t touch her. The requirement to work 80 hours a month in paid employment or voluntary work does not apply to a woman who is pregnant or is raising any child aged 13 or younger.
Most people outside the Left think children aged 14 and older can be left to look after themselves for four hours a day. Some of those teenagers might even go out and earn money babysitting other people’s children.
One in every four people is on Medicaid, a program set up for the poor that has been massively expanded and therefore weakened by Democrats. The millions of enrollees are soaking up money borrowed from our grandchildren’s future. The entitlement is obviously being abused, and it is absurd to say spending back at 2020 levels is “cruel” or will kill people. It is demagoguery, pure and simple.
There is an even more telling reason why Democratic election campaigns are doomed if they rely on demagoguing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It is that the reforms don’t even take effect until the start of 2027.
Medicaid eligibility work requirements for able-bodied recipients aged 19-64 start on Dec. 31, 2026, two months after the midterm congressional elections are over. States that enroll illegal immigrants won’t face funding cuts until October 2027. The $35 co-pay for Medicaid recipients with incomes above the annual $15,500 poverty line will not apply until October 2028, just a month before the next presidential election.
These dates mean the howling horrors Democrats are crying “wolf” about will not have gone into effect when voters next cast their ballots, and others will hardly have had time to resonate by the time the nation is choosing the next occupant of the White House.
Voters don’t get worked up about things that have not happened, and the horrors Democrats foretell will not have happened in two different ways: They won’t have been applied, and once they are, voters will realize they aren’t horrors anyway.
“I think we’re screwed,” a Democratic operative told me as he contemplated the electoral politics of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. His party has to pump up the issue — it’s part of the Democrats’ trick of pretending they’re on the side of the little guy — but it will turn to ashes and run away through their fingers.
When America elects its next Congress, the reforms about which they tell scare stories will not have started. By the time the nation chooses its next president, voters will have realized the scaremongering was empty.