This is an adapted excerpt from the Aug. 21 episode of “Deadline: White House.”
Vice President JD Vance traveled to Georgia on Thursday to try to sell voters on Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.” During his remarks, the vice president repeatedly referred to the massive tax and spending bill passed by the GOP-controlled Congress earlier this year as a “working families tax cut.”
Now, I get it, Vance has a hard job — one he’s been getting quite a lot of breaks from — but selling this bill will likely be his toughest challenge yet. Trump’s bill wasn’t intended to help this country’s working families.
There’s one simple question everyone should be asking the Republicans trying to sell this bill to the American people: Why were the tax cuts for billionaires made permanent, with no sunset clause, and the tax cuts for overtime and tips made temporary?
What Vance and his fellow Republicans are trying to do is so cynical. They are out there with a straight face, acting like they’re taking care of the working people, when, in reality, all they’re doing is helping out their billionaire buddies. Rebranding the budget bill as a “working families tax cut” is like putting lipstick on a pig.
This is a bill that gutted Medicaid and slashed funding for rural hospitals. Those aren’t policies that help this country’s working families.
Even though Americans will continue to see and feel the negative effects of Trump’s agenda, that doesn’t mean it’s a foregone conclusion that Republicans will be defeated next year.
This week, a new report from The New York Times found that the Democratic Party is “hemorrhaging” voters. According to the Times: “Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot.”
Now, it’s important to acknowledge that there are still more Democrats registered in America than Republicans. But it’s also important to note that over 40% of Americans consider themselves independents. This isn’t just a problem for Democrats; both parties are unpopular.
So the movement that I am most interested in watching between now and the midterms is what is going to happen with all the Americans who say, “A pox on both your houses.” How can the Democrats convince them, the country’s independent voters, that this is the party they should be supporting?
If I were a Democrat running in a purple state, I wouldn’t be hyperfocused on what my party’s base is saying in polling, and I wouldn’t be hyperfocused on what the MAGA base is saying in polling. Instead, I would look at what the wide swath of independent voters think. Ultimately, they are the ones who will decide this country’s future.