U.S. President Donald Trump signed his 'big, beautiful' tax and spending bill into law on Independence Day.Julia Demaree Nikhinson/The Associated Press
Next year’s midterm congressional campaigns in the United States just began.
No one’s voting right now. Very few ads are being broadcast. Almost no election-oriented social-media offensives have begun.
But that doesn’t mean the campaign isn’t underway. It’s being waged, and raged, full force.
More than Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2024 presidential election victories, the 2026 midterms may be the most revealing test of whether the President truly has transformed the Republican Party – and whether he’s set American electoral politics on a new course.
Next year’s congressional elections are a test of policy, not personality. Mr. Trump will be evaluated not against Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris, in retrospect easy targets and perfect foils for a disrupter in a country in turmoil. He instead will be judged against his vision of the country’s economy and culture in the setting of the turmoil he has created.
Congressional approval of Mr. Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax and spending bill was the predicate of this political test. The President’s bravura signing ceremony on Independence Day propelled the country to the starting gates. Now – the barbecues finished, the echoes of the fireworks fading – the country’s political figures, both supporters and opponents of the measure, are swinging from being lawmakers into being campaigners.
“This is the single most popular bill ever signed,” Mr. Trump said Friday, as he affixed his signature. It’s also the single biggest risk undertaken by any president since George H.W. Bush signed a 1990 budget agreement raising taxes two years after he bellowed, “Read my lips: No new taxes.”
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Both presidents knew the extent of their risk. In Mr. Trump’s case, Tony Fabrizio, his 2016 campaign pollster, distributed a survey showing that 92 per cent of Americans, including 87 per cent of Trump voters, believe that as many Americans as possible should be covered by health insurance. Yet the plan approved last week imperils that for as many as 17 million people.
Two-thirds of swing voters, and half of Trump voters, oppose cutting Medicaid, the health plan for the poor. That group includes many voters Mr. Trump has taken into the GOP to pay for tax cuts that benefit the wealthy, who increasingly lean Democratic.
The great, inescapable irony: Mr. Trump’s triumph on Capitol Hill provided the talking points for his rivals on the campaign trail. And though his core supporters haven’t wavered from him, the dramatic cuts in health care, other economic assistance and social programs in this measure hit hard at the blue-collar voters, traditionally aligned with the Democrats, whom he’s attracted to the Republicans.
For decades, Mr. Trump has lived by the advice of hard-knuckle 1950s fixer Roy Cohn, who advised his young protégé never to apologize or to make excuses. But that ethos, embraced with ardour by Mr. Trump, may not do in the political environment the President himself has created.
Mr. Trump has defied political gravity and historical precedence throughout the past 10 years, and the number of times he has faced mortifying defeat only to emerge stronger is beyond count. This may be yet another example – or the exception that injures his rule.
Although a parade of Republican speakers expressed their full support on the House floor, only one in eight Americans strongly favour it, according to a Pew Research Center poll.
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House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries may have channelled 19th-century stem-winders in his eight-hour-45-minute speech opposing the bill – Daniel Webster’s 1830 speech on tariff matters slopped over into two days – but he set out the themes for his party’s effort to regain power in the House, where the Republicans have only a 220-212 advantage.
The Webster speech, perhaps the greatest ever delivered in the Capitol, spoke of political figures “answerable to the people” – the very hope that Democrats have as they look to next year’s elections, when all 435 seats are to be contested. Mr. Jeffries quoted the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (“Budgets are moral documents”) while portraying the measure as an attack on the poor and on middle-class Americans, and a giveaway to the wealthy.
The sway Mr. Trump holds over politics has few precedents, equalling or exceeding that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who used his 1932 victory to ram his New Deal through Congress); Lyndon B. Johnson (whose goodwill after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and his own 1964 landslide re-election allowed him to win sweeping Great Society social programs); and Ronald Reagan (whose 1980 triumph win gave him the power to win tax and budget cuts much like those of Mr. Trump).
The difference: The three earlier presidents had unmistakable mandates from the voters to reimagine the American political landscape. Mr. Trump fell short of a majority in the popular vote (49.8 per cent) and defeated Ms. Harris by only 1.5 percentage points. The smallest margin of the three earlier dominating presidents was Mr. Reagan’s 9.7-percentage-point victory against incumbent Jimmy Carter – large enough to allow him to win support for his budget in a House controlled by his Democratic rivals.
Given political headwinds from history and from a controversial budget measure, Mr. Trump thus faces a separate test of his ability to prevail where others have failed and to buck well-established trends and customs.
American presidents generally see their party lose seats in midterm congressional elections. Since 1994, the opposition party has won the national House popular vote in midterm elections all but once. Joe Biden’s Democrats lost a net nine seats the 2022 midterms. And Mr. Trump well remembers the 2018 elections, when his Republicans lost a net 41 House seats and relinquished control of the chamber.