When Both Parties Are Overconfident - 5/26/25

When the House of Representatives finally passed its budget legislation in the pre-dawn hours last Thursday morning, it was hard to tell which party was more energized. Some of this was due to understandable exhaustion, as the members had been working past midnight for the previous several days. But it was also based in the near-universal conviction among the members that the final budget outcome would produce a sweeping election victory for their party next November. 

Republicans were unsurprisingly giddy with victory after narrowly passing their plan and strongly confident that the package of tax cuts and intensified immigration and defense measures would result in big wins for their party in the midterm elections. Democrats were just as predictably infuriated by the bill’s passage but just as certain that the deep cuts to Medicaid spending and other government services would propel their candidates to victory.

With slightly less than a year and a half before Americans go to the polls again, the battle lines for 2026 are largely set. Expect to hear both parties repeating these talking points continuously until voting has concluded: whichever of them is able to better define the impact of this budget on the nation’s voters will be virtually guaranteed to hold a majority in the next Congress.

Democrats would seem to start this debate with an advantage, as midterm elections have historically benefited the party without a president. American voters are notorious course-correctors, and they tend to react to their just-elected leaders’ first two years in office by bolstering the ranks of their opponents. Democrats also believe that many of the working-class voters who abandoned them for Trump last year will be harmed by the steep reductions in social spending and vote accordingly. 

But Republicans believe that the same cultural and social issues that won over so many of these voters last fall will keep them on the GOP side next year. Already, they are emphasizing that unauthorized immigrants will not receive Medicaid funding under their plan, hoping to capitalize on the same sentiments that have driven public support for stronger border protection and for deportations. (Immigration is currently the only issue area where voters still give Trump positive marks.)

Last Friday, a day after the budget passed the House, another provision became public that may provide clues for the Republican midterm strategy. It turns out that the budget has eliminated all Medicaid funding for gender transition care. The GOP had previously focused their efforts in this area on transgender youth, but the late addition of this provision to the budget bill just hours before its passage will greatly expand this fight and almost certainly return it to center stage in campaigns across the country. Republicans effectively used the debate last year to paint Democrats as culturally out-of-touch with swing voters, and adding a financial component could work to the GOP’s great benefit. 

Of course, there is still a tremendous amount of work to be completed before the final budget legislation is signed into law. Despite Speaker Mike Johnson’s fanciful notion that the Senate will not make major changes to the bill, his Republican colleagues in the upper house seemed poised—and eager—to do just that. But just as Donald Trump’s direct intervention with the House GOP effectively frightened his rank-and-file members to put aside their objections and obediently fall in line, it seems likely that Senate Republicans will do the same once they have finished their public venting.

There’s no possible way to predict the outcome of an election almost one-and-a-half years before it takes place. But despite Trump’s uniquely controversial approach to the presidency, it appears that the midterms will be decided on surprisingly conventional grounds. The most atypical aspect of next year’s election could be the level of assurance of success that both parties simultaneously bring to the fight. 

In last year’s magisterial Oscar nominee Conclave, Ralph Fiennes’ character, Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, offers this warning to his colleagues as they deliberate over the selection of the next pope: “There is one sin which I have come to fear over all others: Certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.”

The book on which the movie was based was published several years ago, but it was improbably set in May of 2025. Cardinal Lawrence was talking about the maneuvering that surrounds a papal selection, but could have just as easily been commenting on today’s congressional politics instead.