(CNN) — President Donald Trump isn’t asking Congress to do much these days. In fact, it often seems like he’d rather he didn’t have to bother with the legislative branch at all.
But despite all of his power grabs – and congressional Republicans’ acquiescence to them – there are certain things he needs lawmakers to do. And perhaps the biggest one is to pass a bill extending his 2017 tax cuts.
The president’s asking a lot.
In fact, he appears to be asking them to pass the most unpopular major legislation in decades.
We’ve received a critical mass of polling on Trump’s and the GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which the House passed last month.
Senate Republicans are still working through some very significant details – including the level of Medicaid cuts, state and local tax deductions, and spending cuts to offset the huge cost of the bill – but we’ve got the broad outlines. And people really do not like those broad outlines.
Across four recent polls from the Washington Post, Fox News, KFF and Quinnipiac University, the legislation was an average of 24 points underwater. On average, 55% of surveyed Americans opposed it, while 31% supported it.
That makes the bill more unpopular than any piece of major legislation passed since at least 1990, according to data crunched by George Washington University political science professor Chris Warshaw.
The current holder for the most unpopular title? The same 2017 Trump tax cuts that Republicans are trying to extend as part of the package. That bill was called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It was an average of about 19 points underwater around the time it passed, slightly more popular than the “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
In fact, there is only one piece of major proposed legislation Warshaw tracked that was more unpopular than the current bill, and it was also a Trump initiative. It was his attempt to overhaul Obamacare earlier in 2017. Some polls at the time showed support for it dropping below 20%. On average, it was about 33 points underwater. The bill ultimately failed.
(You might look at these data and think people just dislike everything these days. Maybe they just hate Congress and that filters down? But in fact, most of then-President Joe Biden’s major pieces of legislation – including Covid relief, infrastructure and the “Build Back Better” economic and climate package in 2021 – were pretty popular. Like double-digits popular.)
Beyond those pieces of legislation, nothing really compares to the unpopularity of Trump’s latest major bill.
Obamacare was slightly but consistently unpopular when it passed in 2009, per Warshaw’s data. The 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bank bailout, opposition to which gave rise to the tea party movement on the right, was slightly more unpopular than that. Then-President Bill Clinton’s failed health care overhaul in the 1990s was in similar territory.
But none of these efforts averaged even double-digits underwater, compared to the 24-point deficit for the current bill.
And when you dig into the numbers, the political problems with the current effort look pretty stark:
- Republican-leaning voters who don’t identify with the MAGA movement opposed the bill 66-33%, according to the KFF poll.
- Independents opposed the bill by around a 3-to-1 margin across all these polls. The KFF and Fox News polls – the ones with the fewest undecideds – showed 7 in 10 independents opposed it.
- Strong opponents of the legislation (30%) outnumbered strong supporters (9%) about 3-to-1 among registered voters, according to the Post/Ipsos poll.
- Americans clearly view the bill as being slanted toward the wealthy. They said 58-21% that it will hurt people with lower incomes rather than help them, but 51-8% that it will help the wealthy, according to KFF.
- More than 6 in 10 people who get health insurance through marketplaces or Medicaid viewed the legislation negatively, according to KFF. (The Congressional Budget Office estimates the House GOP version of the bill would leave 11 million people without insurance by 2034.) This despite those Medicaid recipients being slightly more likely to be Democratic-leaning than Republican-leaning, but people on the marketplaces leaning more Republican.
- Registered voters say 66-14% that it’s “unacceptable” for the bill to add nearly $3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, as the CBO also projects it will, per the Post/Ipsos poll.
Now for the caveats.
It’s still early in the legislative process, and as noted the actual details are being worked out. An amended Senate version, for example, would have to be sent back to the House before it gets anywhere near the president’s desk. The polls suggest Americans don’t know a ton about the legislation at this point, and their views could change.
But the Post/Ipsos poll also shows the people who say they know more about it tend to be more opposed. Those who had heard only “a little” or “nothing at all” opposed it 31-19%, but those who had heard “a great deal” or “a good amount” opposed it 64-33%.
There’s also an argument to be made that the legislation could get more popular after Republicans sell it and pass it. Maybe people are just resistant to change.
Gallup polling showed Trump’s tax cuts, for instance, going from 27 points underwater in December 2017 to just seven points underwater (46% opposed, 39% supported) in September 2018. It was still unpopular, but not historically so.
But crucially, that bill didn’t involve a huge health care overhaul that could kick millions off their insurance, which is clearly the GOP’s biggest political problem right now.
They need something to offset the huge cost of extending the tax cuts, and that means going into entitlements. They’ve argued that the Medicaid cuts would be focused on undocumented people and those who refuse to work, but those claims don’t really hold water.
It’s probably no coincidence that the only major proposal in recent decades that competes with this one is another health care overhaul. The question now for Republicans is whether they want to take a major political risk in actually passing this one.
