The Republican Party’s embrace of a massive tax-and-entitlement-cutting reconciliation bill will test the party’s burgeoning popularity with working-class voters ahead of next year’s elections and for years to come.
Even some conservatives are nervous about the outcome.
“I can’t see how they couldn’t pay a price for it, certainly for 2026, and depending on who the nominee is, for 2028 as well,” said Patrick Brown, counsel for the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative pro-family think tank. “Instinctually, it doesn’t really sit well with me. It’s not how I would operationalize a newly blue-collar working-class coalition.”
At the center of the party’s political challenge is whether the bill — which Republicans sent to President Donald Trump’s desk Thursday — will negatively affect many of the same people who powered Republicans to sweeping victories last year, a blue-collar coalition that included many less-wealthy voters angry at the Democrats’ management of the economy.
Their newfound support was the culmination of Republicans’ long-heralded evolution into a working-class party, strategists have said, one that would define a generation of campaigns and give the GOP an upper hand for years to come.
But if the party’s electoral base has changed, its economic agenda — at least in the reconciliation bill — largely has not. The bill’s combination of high-end tax cuts and social safety net reductions is rooted in the party’s traditional economic vision, conservatives say, one dating back to Ronald Reagan and Paul Ryan.
That makes it an awkward fit in the modern GOP, an argument longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri have made repeatedly in recent months. The tension within the party has been especially visible over provisions in the bill that would tighten Medicaid eligibility requirements, potentially cutting off access to health insurance for millions of low-income Americans.
“I think this is a terrible idea,” Hawley told reporters earlier this week, referencing provisions in the bill that would cut the health insurance program. “And I think that really this is a debate over the soul of the Republican Party. Are we going to be a working-class party or not? And if we’re going to go forward, in years to come, and cut Medicaid like this, that will really harm working people.”
Hawley, of course, ultimately voted for the bill, along with nearly every Republican senator and House member.
Despite the misgivings, party leaders have emphasized they will undertake a robust defense of the bill, which includes some working-class-friendly measures like removing a tax on tips and Social Security. They believe they can continue to grow the party’s blue-collar base, thanks to the bill, Trump’s trade tariffs and other cultural issues that will keep them from swinging back to Democrats.
“There is a positive defense to make, and it’s up to Republicans to go out on the campaign trail and sell it or at least defuse the attacks,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist. “And that’s something they weren’t able to successfully do in 2018.”
Donovan was referencing a tax-cut law signed by Trump in 2017, the provisions of which this year’s reconciliation bill will extend for years to come. In that year’s election, the GOP struggled with Democratic attacks on the tax cuts and a failed but politically damaging Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
The GOP’s shift toward working-class voters, underway in 2018 thanks to Trump’s first run for president, has accelerated since. In 2024, exit polls showed Trump won both voters who make less than $100,000 (51% to Kamala Harris’ 47%) and those who make less than $50,000 (50% to 48%). That was a reversal from 2020, according to exit polls, when Joe Biden won voters who made less than $100,000 (56% to Trump’s 43%) and less than $50,000 (55% to 44%).
Some of those voters stand to lose out financially from the reconciliation bill, which, in addition to tightening access to Medicaid, also cuts Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits.
The least wealthy 40% of Americans come out worse financially with the bill, according to the non-partisan research center The Budget Lab at Yale University, with the bottom 20% faring particularly poorly. The Congressional Budget Office, meanwhile, estimated that nearly 12 million people would eventually lose their health insurance because of the legislation.
The policies targeting those programs have long been part of the conservative movement’s fiscal agenda, analysts say, and haven’t changed just because the party’s voters have.
“That’s basic welfare reform 101 that the [former Republican Speaker] Newt Gingrich House would have passed, put on Bill Clinton’s desk and forced him to sign,” said Tim Chapman, president of the conservative group Advancing American Freedom. “And that’s been conservative canon for decades.”
Chapman, who dismissed provisions like no tax on tips as “gimmicks” that have little overall effect on the bill, said he is confident that Republicans can win the political argument over the bill, saying that voters will reward the party for preventing major across-the-board tax hikes that would have come if Trump’s 2018 cuts were allowed to expire.
Other Republican strategists say the political fallout will depend on whether an economy boosted by the bill’s tax cuts can ease cost-of-living concerns more than entitlement cuts deepen them. But they warned that many of the party’s new voters, unlike the more affluent country club Republican voters of the past, could be sensitive to the reductions in spending.
Wes Anderson, a Republican pollster who has conducted extensive focus groups with many of the newly minted GOP voters, said many of them will say they are worried about the nation’s debt and express support for spending cuts in concept.
“And so you think these guys, they’re ready for hardcore austerity,” he said, recounting how he’s seen focus group conversations go. “But, no, they’re not, because they have no [cost-of-living] margin. So if you do anything that makes those margins tighter, you lose them en masse.”
A similar dynamic happens when the discussion turns to Medicaid, the pollster said.
“That’s the canary in the coal mine,” he said. You go talk to the people we’re talking about, the newest elements of the Republican majority, and you talk to them about Medicaid and ask, ‘Well, should an able-bodied male without kids be on Medicaid?’ And they say, ‘Oh hell no.’ They react very strongly to it.
“Then you start hearing in focus groups, ‘Well, I got this nephew, and he’s really struggled, and I think he’s finally clean, he’s off the heroin,” Anderson continued. “They start talking themselves into a million exceptions. You see it every focus group and say, ‘Oh shit, this isn’t as clean as you think it is.’”
Democrats have already vowed to make the cuts the centerpiece of next year’s campaigns, focusing on a bill they say rips open the social safety net and balloons the deficit all to give the wealthy a larger tax break.
“Make no mistake about it: They just cut their own throats, they just slit their own throats with the very people who got them elected,” said Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee. “The disproportionate impact is going to be on red states, and even in those red states, on rural communities and many of those folks voted for Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.”
Republicans — who say the bill’s individual provisions like instituting work requirements for Medicaid poll well with voters — push back against Democrats by pointing to the party’s prior successes after passing similar bills. If the GOP’s traditional fiscal agenda were such an anathema to working-class voters, they say, then the party would never have had so much success in 2024 to begin with.
The 2017 tax law’s eventual success for Trump, in the way it boosted his image as a savvy economic manager, was a “proof of concept,” Chapman said.
“The win in ’24 was a win based on what voters remembered about the economy from the first Trump administration,” he said. “That was the driving force.”
Other Republicans say the Democratic Party has so deeply alienated working-class voters on cultural issues that the economic fallout, if there is any, would likely not be enough to sway them from the GOP.
“You’re going to have a very hard time talking to a Trump/Biden/Trump voter about how your policies somehow produce better financial security if you can’t tell the mechanic in Western Pennsylvania that there are two genders and biological men should not be throwing 75-mile-per-hour underhand fastballs at 17-year-old girls in the state champions game,” said Jesse Hunt, a Republican strategist.
Republicans say they are confident that Trump can message the bill effectively. Other GOP leaders will have to prove they have the same ability.
Trump “can reconcile that we can preserve and protect Medicaid and not cut benefits, but also reform it to the tune of $800 billion. He’s able to do that,” Donovan said. “The question is, are other Republicans able to articulate that in a way that’s able to take the sting out of it politically?”