Photo by Jonathan Cooper
Trump’s budget clearly favors certain supporters over others. It reallocates funds from health care intended for his low-income populist base to sustain tax subsidies for his wealthiest backers. As Trump’s populist base learns the details of his “Big Beautiful Budget,” Republican members of Congress will face consequences. This is especially true for Senate Republicans, who do not benefit from gerrymandered districts; their constituents cover the entire state.
As long as House Republicans are led by their Freedom Caucus (see The Far-Right Freedom Caucus), they will continue to focus on reducing health care protections for Trump’s largest demographic, which consists of low-income families with children and seniors. They believe these individuals must make this sacrifice to balance the budget. Whatever the House passes must be approved by the Senate, and some Republican senators are concerned about being forced to vote on a budget that openly cuts essential services like Medicaid.
Before discussing how lower-income MAGA supporters will be affected by these cuts, it is crucial to recognize that Republicans in both chambers support a budget that maintains a tax structure favoring wealthier Americans. One of the best examples is their budget proposal, which extends the individual alternative minimum tax (AMT) repeal. This line item benefits higher-income individuals by ensuring they pay a minimum level of tax, even if they use various deductions and credits that could significantly reduce their regular income tax liability.
Before Trump’s last significant budget tax-cutting package, the TCJA, from his first term, over 5 million taxpayers had to file an AMT return. Just after the TCJA passed, only 200,000 had to pay the AMT. The current House budget continues the repeal. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, this repeal would reduce revenues by nearly $1.4 trillion over the next decade, accounting for 42% of the total federal deficit.
As a result, the percentage of wealthier citizens paying the AMT tax with this subsidy remains around 0.1%, instead of the 4% of the population subject to the normal tax rate that everyone else pays. This is not what making America great again was supposed to be promoting.
If one connects the dots from Trump’s budget (now the Republican Party’s) to the effects on his voter base and the most vulnerable Republican senators, it outlines a critical path leading to a Democratic-controlled Senate. Some senators risk losing their seats if they vote for a House version that cuts services for their baseline lower-income supporters in rural counties across each state.
The Republican budget claims to cut waste, but it actually makes the government more inefficient, directly harming seniors.
Republicans in Congress argue that their budget will save taxpayers money by reducing waste. It sounds appealing, but every organization and every human invention has some inefficiency. For example, most road-legal cars achieve only about 20% to 40% efficiency. Cost-conscious corporations typically operate auto manufacturing plants within an efficiency range of 60% to 70%. In other words, a degree of waste can be found in all human activities.
To be more efficient is good, but Trump’s Republican administration is exploiting a naturally occurring element of inefficiency to enact a political policy. No matter how small one might be, they are amplifying their importance to cut basic public services with little attention to those being denied, many of whom are Trump supporters.
Judd Legum of Popular Information writes about a memo from Trump-appointed Acting Deputy Social Security Administration Commissioner Doris Diaz that illustrates how this strategic practice unfolds. Elon Musk identified some minor inefficiencies within the Social Security Administration, suggesting that 10% of all federal expenditures were related to Social Security fraud. The “fraud” was mainly improper payments resulting from beneficiaries or the SSA failing to update records. This amounts to less than 1% of total Social Security benefits paid and 0.1% of the federal budget.
Due to this faulty logic, Diaz’s memo suggested requiring a social security recipient to visit a field office to provide in-person identity documentation if they cannot correctly use the “internet identity proofing” instructions. How often are internet instructions unclear that users need to make a phone call to understand them?
If seniors encounter difficulties, they must go to an SSA office and wait in line to speak with a service representative. Additionally, there may be fewer staff available. Trump’s DOGE announced plans to cut Social Security staff by 7,000 workers, 12% of their workforce.
Republican congressional representatives will be held accountable for this issue since they control the federal government. They should remember that, according to the Census Bureau, 72 percent of voters aged 65 and older cast their ballots in 2020, and Trump won them over Kamala Harris by just one percent.
Cutting health services to Medicaid, SNAP, and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) will threaten Republican support of low-income whites in rural areas.
In the 2020 election, most lower-income households—defined as those earning less than $50,000 a year—voted for Trump. Studies also show that lower-income whites supported Trump at higher rates than their higher-income counterparts.
That pattern may change significantly next year, as estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predict that 7.6 million lower-income voters will lose their health insurance and 3 million will be denied SNAP benefits (aka food stamps). Over the next decade, this would cut more than $1 trillion from healthcare and food assistance programs.
When we think about people living in poverty, the media often emphasizes a racial portrayal of poverty, which the Feds define as having incomes at or below $50,000. However, little attention is given to the fact that poor white voters make up 73% of all voting-age adults living in poverty. And they vote: Thirty-eight million cast their ballots in 2020, representing an 80% turnout. In comparison, the corresponding Black population of 6 million had a turnout of 68%.
Most rural white poor voters supported Republicans, and they did so even more in 2024 than in 2020. According to a preliminary analysis by the New York Times, over 90 percent of counties shifted in favor of President-elect Trump in the 2024 presidential election, increasing his vote margin from 2020 in more than 2,300 counties. Vice President Kamala Harris carried only 427 counties, losing nearly a quarter of the counties with small urban areas.
The Democratic Party is rooted in these urban counties, so it is natural to expect that much of its attention focuses on minorities who are more concentrated in those areas. However, the current proposed Republican budgets will deprive outer core urban and rural communities of essential health services that previous Democratic administrations provided.
Congressional Republicans are overstretching their position by eliminating some long-standing and essential health services for rural areas in their pursuit to balance a budget burdened by tax benefits for high-income earners. Fortunately for them, Democrats are only making shallow forays into these regions to explain how the Republican budget will cut health care services for the rural poor, who are primarily Republican voters.
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The Republican budget will significantly impact rural Americans by reducing federal health programs.
The impact will be felt in blue states, such as Washington, and red ones, like Missouri. Seattle Times columnist, “Nine of the 10 Washington counties that use Obamacare and Medicaid the most, per capita, are red-voting.” Fifty percent of the working-age population in the top seven counties is on subsidized health care. In Missouri, where there are two Republican Senators, nearly 47% of children living in rural areas relied on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for coverage.
Missouri Senator Josh Hawley warned his fellow Republican Senators that allowing the budget to cut funding for federal health programs would benefit corporate giveaways at the expense of slashing health insurance for the working poor. According to the latest analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Republicans would strip almost 9 million low-income Americans of their health insurance, primarily by trimming Medicaid.
The House budget subtly reduces Medicaid without Republicans needing to label it as a cut.
It achieves these reductions by tightening eligibility, complicating enrollment and retention processes, and shifting Medicaid costs from the federal government to the states.
It shifts Medicaid costs to states by limiting their ability to tax health care providers (aka a “provider tax”), impacting hospitals and other health service providers that rely on Medicaid. Provider tax is essential for maintaining health coverage for low-income Americans in 49 states. Due to this provision, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that states will lose nearly $90 billion in the next decade if the Senate approves the House budget.
Along with freezing or limiting state provider taxes and facing reduced federal funding, states will be required to dedicate more time and resources to implementing the stringent new work and eligibility rules mandated by the budget for utilizing Medicaid.
The Republican senators face a choice of approving the House budget or keeping their jobs.
House Republicans narrowly passed their budget, but a few Republican senators may face backlash from populist voters if they support it and cut health coverage.
These senators face reelection in six states where Medicaid covers one-fifth of non-elderly adults living in small towns and rural areas. They are Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, West Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito, Montana’s Steve Daines, Arkansas’s Tom Cotton, and Alaska’s Dan Sullivan. Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell is retiring, so his seat will be an open race.
Furthermore, there are three states with Republican senators up for reelection where at least half of the children living in small towns and rural areas are covered by Medicaid/CHIP, which are on the chopping block. The Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) is a joint federal and state program that provides health coverage to children in families who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but cannot afford private insurance. Those senators and states are Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas.
As the Brookings Institution reported, the Republican budget “plan saves money mainly by removing millions of people from coverage, while offering no alternative means to insure them.” Republican efforts tweak obscure state taxes and revamp income verification schedules for both Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies.
One such unpublicized change could limit or potentially eliminate funding for Obamacare Medicaid recipients, which has long been a Republican objective. Three Republican senators facing reelection represent states that extended Obamacare federal funds to include Medicaid recipients. Additionally, they have “trigger laws” that require their state legislature to end expansion if the Obamacare funding match to the state falls below 90 percent of the expansion cost.
If they support the House budget, the three senators—Steve Daines from Montana, Thom Tillis from North Carolina, and Tom Cotton from Arkansas—will be accountable for bringing this issue to their state legislators.
The situations described expose these seven senators to a potentially angry base of lower-income white voters in strongly conservative states. If these voters experience cuts to their health benefits and financial security, their loyalty to these senators and the Republican Party will diminish. Democrats should focus on illustrating how the Republican budget plan and the sacrifices faced by their supporters are interconnected.
However, in doing so, Democrats must pivot away from blaming billionaires for voters’ problems, regardless of how true that may be. Instead, they need to present clear and specific measures they are committed to implementing. Those efforts should begin today and not wait until after they are elected.
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