President Donald Trump is about to achieve his biggest legislative victory yet: his “one big, beautiful bill” — the massive tax- and Medicaid-cutting, immigration and border spending bill passed the Senate on Tuesday — is on the verge of passing the House of Representatives.
It’s a massive piece of legislation, likely to increase the national debt by at least $3 trillion, mostly through tax cuts, and leave 17 million Americans without health coverage — and it’s really unpopular. Majorities in nearly every reputable poll taken this month disapprove of the bill, ranging from 42 percent who oppose the bill in an Ipsos poll (compared to 23 percent who support) to 64 percent who oppose it in a KFF poll.
And if history is any indication, it’s not going to get any better for Trump and the Republicans from here on out.
In modern American politics, few things are more unpopular with the public than big, messy bills forged under a bright spotlight. That’s especially true of bills passed through a Senate mechanism called “budget reconciliation,” a Senate procedure that allows the governing party to bypass filibuster rules with a simple majority vote. They tend to have a negative effect on presidents and their political parties in the following months as policies are implemented and campaign seasons begin.
Part of that effect is due to the public’s general tendency to dislike any kind of legislation as it gets more publicity and becomes better understood. But reconciliation bills in the modern era seem to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: forcing presidents to be maximally ambitious at the outset, before they lose popular support for the legislation and eventually lose the congressional majorities that delivered passage.
Presidents and their parties tend to be punished after passing big spending bills
The budget reconciliation process, created in 1974, has gradually been used to accomplish broader and bigger policy goals. Because it offers a workaround for a Senate filibuster, which requires 60 votes to break, it has become the primary way that presidents and their parties implement their economic and social welfare visions.
The public, however, doesn’t tend to reward the governing party after these bills are passed. As political writer and analyst Ron Brownstein recently pointed out, presidents who successfully pass a major reconciliation bill in the first year of their presidency lose control of Congress, usually the House, the following year.
In 1982, Ronald Reagan lost his governing majority in the House after using reconciliation to pass large spending cuts as part of his Reaganomics vision (the original “big, beautiful” bill). And the pattern would repeat itself for George H.W. Bush (whose reconciliation bill contradicted his campaign promise not to raise taxes), for Bill Clinton in 1994 (deficit reductions and tax reform), for Barack Obama in 2010 (after the passage of the Affordable Care Act), for Trump in 2018 (tax cuts), and for Biden in 2022 (the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act).
The exception in this list of modern presidents is George W. Bush, who did pass a set of tax cuts in a reconciliation bill, but whose approval rating rose after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Increasing polarization, and the general anti-incumbent party energy that tends to run through midterm elections, of course, explains part of this overall popular and electoral backlash. But reconciliation bills themselves seem to intensify this effect.
Why reconciliation bills do so much political damage
First, there’s the actual substance of these bills, which has been growing in scope over time.
Because they tend to be the first, and likely only, major piece of domestic legislation that can execute a president’s agenda, they are often highly ideological, partisan projects that try to implement as much of a governing party’s vision as possible.
These highly ideological pieces of legislation, Matt Grossman, the director of Michigan State University’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, and his partners have found, tend to kick into gear a “thermostatic” response from the public — that is, that public opinion moves in the opposite direction of policymaking when the public perceives one side is going too far to the right or left.
Because these bills have actually been growing in reach, from mere tax code adjustments to massive tax-and-spend, program-creating bills, and becoming more ideological projects, the public, in turn, seems to be reacting more harshly.
These big reconciliation bills also run into an issue that afflicts all kinds of legislation: It has a PR problem. Media coverage of proposed legislation tends to emphasize its partisanship, portraying the party in power as pursuing its domestic agenda at all costs and emphasizing that parties are fighting against each other. This elevates process over policy substance. Political scientist Mary Layton Atkinson has found that just like campaign reporting is inclined to focus on the horse race, coverage of legislation in Congress and policy debates often focuses on conflict and procedure, adding to a sense in the public mind that Congress is extreme, dysfunctional, and hyperpartisan.
Adding to this dynamic is a quirk of public opinion toward legislation and referenda: Proposals tend to get less popular, and lose public support, between proposal and passage, as the public learns more about the actual content of initiatives and as they hear more about the political negotiations and struggles taking place behind the scenes as these bills are ironed out.
Lawmakers and key political figures also “tend to highlight the benefits less than the things that they are upset about in the course of negotiations,” Grossman told me. “That [also] occurs when a bill passes: You have the people who are against it saying all the terrible things about it, and actually the people who are for it are often saying, ‘I didn’t get all that I wanted, I would have liked it to be slightly different.’ So the message that comes out of it is actually pretty negative on the whole, because no one is out there saying this is the greatest thing and exactly what they wanted.”
Even with the current One Big Beautiful Bill, polling analysis shows that the public tends not to be very knowledgeable about what is in the legislative package, but gets even more hostile to it once they learn or are provided more information about specific policy details.
Big reconciliation bills exist at the intersection of all three of these public image problems: They tend to be the first major legislative challenge a new president and Congress take on, they suck up all the media’s attention, they direct the public’s attention to one major piece of legislation, and they take a pretty long time to iron out — further extending the timeline in which the bill can get more unpopular.
This worsening perception over time, the public’s frustration with how the sausage is made, and the growing ideological stakes of these bills, all create a kind of feedback loop: Governing parties know that they have limited time and a single shot to implement their vision before experiencing some form of backlash in future elections, so they rush to pass the biggest and boldest bill possible. The cycle repeats itself, worsening public views in the process and increasing polarization. For now, Trump has set a July 4 deadline for signing this bill into law. He looks likely to hit that goal, or at least come close. But all signs are pointing to this “beautiful” bill delivering him and his party a big disappointment next year. He’s already unpopular, and when he focuses his and the public’s attention on his actual agenda, it tends not to go well.
