Sen. Mitch McConnell reportedly said voters would “get over” Medicaid cuts. Democrats plan to do their best to ensure that’s not the case.
Democratic strategists told NOTUS they are recommending candidates put a heavy focus on health care to keep Medicaid at the top of voters’ minds going into the midterm elections. One strategist said he has been advising clients to make health care messaging the lion’s share of their ad budget.
“I would tell any Democrat running for office this cycle that everything should be a contrast between what he or she is going to do to lower costs and protect health care and what Republicans are doing to cut health care costs,” said Ian Russell, a partner at Beacon Media and alum of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Democrats are banking on voter backlash to the reconciliation bill to increase their odds of winning the 2026 midterms, and strategists said they see Republican passage as handing ammunition to Democratic campaigns.
Russell described the Medicaid cuts as “deeply unpopular” — fewer than one in five adults want to see Medicaid funding decreased, according to a recent KFF Health Tracking poll — and said voters are going to “hate it more as we educate them about it even more during the upcoming election cycle.”
But Democrats acknowledged it will take a concerted effort to keep attention on Medicaid cuts with so much other news sucking up the oxygen.
They were aided by recent comments by McConnell and Sen. Joni Ernst that downplayed the impact of the president’s reconciliation package on Medicaid. In a closed-door meeting with Senate Republicans this week, McConnell reportedly said, “I know a lot of us are hearing from people back home about Medicaid. But they’ll get over it.” (His office later said his comment was taken out of context.) Ernst brushed off a question about health care access at a May town hall by saying, “Well, we’re all going to die.”
While Republican comments dismissing the effect of Medicaid provide Democrats a useful talking point, strategists said that emphasizing voters’ personal stories will be key.
“I don’t think that [Medicaid] will be the top story until we understand the extent of the cuts and who it’s going to hurt,” said Terrance Woodbury, a pollster and founding partner at HIT Strategies. “Once we understand who it’s gonna hurt, that becomes the messenger. Not the politicians, not the candidates, [but] the families that are being hurt, the mothers that are being hurt, the communities that are being hurt, the rural hospitals that are being closed. Those become the messengers.”
In the past several months, Democrats have hosted rallies, town halls and days of action across the country to rebuke Republicans’ proposed cuts. In his speech marking Trump’s 100 days in office, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries even spotlighted a woman he met in North Carolina and how Medicaid cuts would make it harder for her to take care of her grandchildren.
Some candidates can share their own stories. Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who is running for Senate, has been traveling across the state talking about the impact of Medicaid cuts, said Alexandra Fetissoff, founder of Foxhole Communications & Strategies, which is working on Flanagan’s campaign.
“Peggie has this incredibly unique voice because she’s someone who grew up on Medicaid,” Fetissoff said. “This thought about the cuts and how many millions of people are being affected — when you hear that number, and it’s so big, you forget about the faces behind it. And here’s someone who it’s like, ‘I am the face behind that number.’”
Another strategy will be to use Republicans’ own words against them.
“When you have Thom Tillis showing up with a list demonstrating how bad off his state would be under this bill — if he flips and votes for the bill, he just wrote his opponent’s TV ads,” Russell said. “If Susan Collins or any of the other vulnerable Republican senators vote for this thing, or any of the other vulnerable House Republican members vote for this thing, this is going to come back and haunt them.”
While Democratic strategists are fairly confident they can best Republicans on the health care issue, they said it’s too early to predict what will animate voters more than a year out from Election Day.
“The same way that I knew in 2024 that if immigration was a more important issue than abortion, then we’ve lost, the same thing is true now,” Woodbury told NOTUS. “If immigration is a more important issue than Medicaid, we have lost. That means we are arguing on Republicans’ issue landscape and not ours.”
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Tinashe Chingarande is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.