Congress
Democrats are ready to campaign on expired Obamacare subsidies
Obamacare subsidies used by more than 20 million expired Thursday. Now Democrats are ready to make them a centerpiece of their midterm campaigns.
The lapse of enhanced premium tax credits, first passed as a pandemic-era relief measure under President Joe Biden in 2021, will immediately hit the pocketbooks of voters — some of whom will see their monthly insurance premiums rise by hundreds of dollars.
Efforts to extend them in some fashion continue on Capitol Hill, but Democratic lawmakers and strategists are already moving to turn the expiration of the subsidies into a potent election-year attack on congressional Republicans. They note that unlike other Democratic messaging targets — such as recent GOP Medicaid cuts that won’t kick in until after midterm ballots are cast — the lost tax credits are already tangible proof of what’s at stake on Election Day.
“The public now gets that the subsidies are what’s keeping health care costs down,” said Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.). “I think the public’s angry. So I think they will blame the party in charge.”
The strategy has been months in the making. Mindful of how the GOP’s efforts to rein in Obamacare powered their massive gains in the 2018 midterms, top party leaders decided in September to make health care the focus of the government funding fight.
That posture led to a record 43-day shutdown, and while some Senate Democrats ultimately agreed to reopen the government without securing an extension of the tax credits, many in the party are increasingly confident they succeeded in putting the issue into focus ahead of the election year.
They also believe it will play into a broader messaging push around affordability — attacking President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans for their failure to address rising costs, of which insurance premiums are just one conspicuous challenge facing Republicans.
“It’s part of the top issue, which is cost of living — whether it’s groceries, gas, housing, energy costs,” said Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.). “Health care seems to be top of mind as something that Congress can actually do to bring down the costs.”
A KFF poll released in December found that large majorities of enrollees in Obamacare marketplace plans want the subsidies to continue, regardless of party. About three-quarters of that group said they would blame Trump or Republicans in Congress if the subsidies were to lapse.
Republicans have encountered difficulties forming a coherent counterattack. Trump has questioned whether affordability is even a problem, calling the focus on living costs a “hoax” perpetrated by Democrats and the media. He has instead focused on robust economic growth as a measure of his administration’s success.
On Capitol Hill, top GOP leaders have criticized the expiring subsidies as wasteful — subsidizing some high-income households and susceptible to fraud — but they have not coalesced around a plan to offer relief to the millions of Americans who buy insurance on Obamacare marketplaces. A package of health care measures passed by the House last month on a party-line vote included some conservative proposals to deregulate insurance markets, but they would have little immediate effect before the midterms.
Instead, Republicans are preparing to run on last year’s megabill, which included tax cuts and other provisions that will start kicking in this year. This, they believe, will help them hold onto their congressional majorities.
“House Republicans delivered historic tax relief for working families and are building on it in the new year,” said NRCC spokesperson Mike Marinella. “Democrats spent the year blocking commonsense solutions [for the subsidies] and are now having a temper tantrum over a policy cliff of their own making. Their inability to find a consistent message that sticks proves how out of touch they are with the American people.”
Democrats’ party campaign arm is already geared up to push a health-care focused message for the next 10 months. Its leaders have laid out why they believe it’s a key issue heading into the midterms and have already run ads and rented billboards highlighting the GOP’s opposition to continuing the subsidies.
“Make no mistake, the blame behind the skyrocketing health care costs millions are facing today is squarely at the feet of House Republicans, and the American people know it,” DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) said in a statement. “Instead of putting forth a serious proposal to address spiking health care costs, House Republicans chose to focus on delivering massive tax breaks for the wealthiest few — never even allowing a floor vote to save the tax credits before their expiration.”
It is true no vote took place before the expiration, but jitters about an electoral backlash prompted a handful of House Republicans to take the rare step last month of circumventing GOP leadership and signing onto an effort backed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to force a floor vote on a three-year extension of the expired subsidies.
That vote is now expected to take place in the coming weeks, though Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he has no intention of holding a vote in his own chamber, and even Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has played down the prospects of a bipartisan extension.
“Once Jan. 1 comes and everyone is locked into their insurance proposals, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube,” he said last month.
The purple-district Republicans said they intend to keep trying, and they are coordinating with a bipartisan group of senators that is trying to strike a late compromise to save the subsidies. But Democrats believe it is too little, too late — even as they say it is a telling move.
For the vulnerable Republicans “to come on at the 11th hour shows they get it,” said Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.). “Their constituents are going to be mighty mad, and they’re feeling it already.”
A top pollster for President Donald Trump is pushing back on recent public polling showing Republican Mike Rogers trailing progressive Abdul El-Sayed in the marquee Michigan Senate race.
Tony Fabrizio, who is conducting polling for Rogers, says the polls released this month are over-sampling Democratic-leaning voters, specifically college-educated and Black voters, according to an internal memo obtained by Blue Light News. A Susquehanna poll released this month showed El-Sayed leading by seven points and a TIPP poll showed him leading by four points.
El-Sayed’s lead in those polls is a “fake narrative,” Fabrizio wrote. His polling for AARP — conducted alongside Democratic firm Impact Research — showed the race essentially tied.
The warning follows huge polling misses in the Democratic primaries in the Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida, which he wrote were “some of the most egregious examples of public polling failures in recent memory.” It’s also a sign that Republicans are wary of the string of bad polling numbers for Rogers in the race, which is crucial for determining control of the chamber.
Jim Lee, CEO of Susquehanna Polling and Research, told Blue Light News that the firm did not oversample any demographics. “I think their head is in the sand,” Lee said, noting in part what he said was a gap in enthusiasm between Democratic and Republican voters this cycle.
TIPP didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Fabrizio, in the memo, argued on the Susquehanna poll: “50% of the sample in this survey is college-educated – making them massively overrepresented to what they should be. We took a look at 2022 and 2024 Exit Polls and VoteCast data and, as shown below, there is no indication that the Michigan electorate will be anywhere near 50% college-educated. In fact, it is unlikely they will be even 40% college-educated.”
He also noted “a huge gap” between college-educated and non-college educated voters.
“This was the driving issue of the public polling misses for President Trump in 2016 and 2024, especially in the Upper Midwest states of Michigan and Wisconsin,” Fabrizio added. “By increasing college-educated voters by 10+ points, and thus decreasing non-college educated voters by the same, we can pretty much guarantee this poll is significantly overestimating El-Sayed’s vote share.”
President Donald Trump and hemp industry lobbyists are hoping to win a final vote on Capitol Hill next week to skirt a ban on intoxicating products — with shutdown politics as leverage.
Nine months ago, Congress cleared a bill to close a loophole created in 2018 that allowed the sale of some hemp-derived products containing types of THC colloquially known as “diet weed.” That ban is supposed to take effect in mid-November, or roughly 11 weeks, to limit overall THC levels in hemp products that can get people high — including gummies, canned drinks, pills and vapes.
But Trump and industry leaders successfully lobbied Senate leaders to add language to a government funding patch earlier this month to delay the ban until mid-December, with the administration promising instead to finalize regulations cracking down on how the products are made and sold.
Now House Republican leaders are aiming to clear that bill for Trump’s signature early next week, according to three people granted anonymity to disclose private discussions. And many GOP lawmakers are not pleased at the prospect of being rolled.
Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) told reporters last week that he expected House lawmakers would “iron out” some “sticking points” with the Senate-passed funding bill, “particularly the hemp issue,” rather than pass the legislation without changes — which appears to be GOP leadership’s current plan.
Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) was more blunt: “it is morally reprehensible to threaten a shutdown over a loophole Congress agreed to close to less than a year ago,” he said in a statement Thursday.
Yet despite fierce pushback from lawmakers warning that the intoxicating products are harming Americans, hemp industry leaders are preparing for a victory, betting members of Congress ultimately care more about swiftly passing legislation to avert a Sept. 30 government shutdown before the midterms.
“Any effort to try to shut down the government — over a one-month delay on a hemp issue — I don’t think is going to fly well with most members of Congress,” Jonathan Miller, a top lawyer for the U.S. Hemp Roundtable advocacy group, said in an interview this week.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about its plans for imposing new rules on hemp products in the coming months. But the Trump administration is expected to need more time than mid-December to finalize regulations, so hemp industry representatives are discussing a “regulatory bridge” that would impose temporary rules while continuing to avoid a full ban, according to Miller.
That could include restricting purchase to adults age 21 and older, blocking imports from China, mandating certain manufacturing practices, cracking down on copycat products that look like popular candy or potato chips and requiring transparency in product labeling.
While lawmakers have been back home over their summer break, hemp industry leaders have fanned out across the country to make their case for this plan. “The hemp industry does not have an August recess,” Christopher Lackner, head of the Hemp Beverage Alliance, said in an interview this month of the group’s work to facilitate passage of the Senate-passed funding bill.
Trump administration officials have also been telling reluctant lawmakers they will use the one-month delay to work on regulations. “The White House has committed to me that they’re committed to regulate the industry,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said in an interview this month.
Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.), who fought in the Senate to retain the ban as originally intended, said White House officials have said “they don’t want another extension, and I agree with that.”
In a statement, Ricketts said that “manufactured high-THC products like gummies and drinks are putting our kids in the hospital” and need to be taken “off our shelves.”
Some supporters of the ban say the White House and industry are just employing delay tactics to get to December, when lawmakers will face another pressure campaign to delay the ban while they are motivated to avert a shutdown before leaving town for the holidays.
“What they’re really after is to try to jam this on some must-pass, end-of-the-year funding,” Budd told reporters earlier this month. “That’s really what this is about.”
Budd fought to block the delay in the Senate as part of the government funding measure, but his amendment to that end was shot down 61-32 before the chamberpassed the legislation, sending it on for House action.
Trump personally called Budd after the senator filed the amendment and talked about creating federal regulations for hemp products, according to a Senate aide granted anonymity to describe the private discussion.
Days later, Budd demanded a vote on the amendment anyway and continues to slam the hemp industry.
“It is clear that businesses that sell unregulated, intoxicating products will stop at nothing to protect their bottom line, even at the expense of children’s health and safety,” he said in a statement this week.
Besides lawmakers fighting to ban intoxicating hemp products, others are pushing alongside the White House and industry for federal regulations.
Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-W.Va.) has crafted legislation that would direct the Food and Drug Administration to create federal rules for intoxicating hemp products and wants to see mandates for third-party testing, as well as new THC limits per serving.
Griffith told reporters Thursday the “deadline push” in the Senate-passed government funding measure “is not long enough” to finalize necessary regulations.
Since state limits for THC vary widely throughout the country and the federal government has taken years to step in since the hemp loophole was created in 2018, Griffith argued it makes more sense to regulate the intoxicating products than to enact a federal ban.
“That horse is out of the barn,” he said. “What we need to do is corral it.”
Kelsey Brugger, Amanda Friedman and Rachel Shin contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump’s $400-million super PAC is taking its first steps into the general election: hosting a public event in battleground Michigan, headlined by Vice President JD Vance.
Battleground Republicans have been clamoring for Trump’s MAGA Inc. to spend in competitive races. The Michigan event is an early indicator of how the massive group might seek to use its funds to help the party keep control of Washington.
Vance will be joined in Sterling, Michigan, on Monday by GOP Senate nominee Mike Rogers, 10th District nominee Mike Bouchard Jr. and gubernatorial nominee John James, along with several other Michigan Republicans, according to an event advisory from MAGA Inc.
The GOP sees Michigan’s open seat as its best Senate pickup target this fall as Rogers faces former public health leader and progressive Abdul El-Sayed, who emerged from a grueling primary earlier this month.
“MAGA Inc. will be hosting events throughout the nation to ensure that Republicans retain control of Congress in order to finish cleaning up the mess the Biden-Harris-Pelosi-Schumer Democrats left,” said Alex Pfeiffer, spokesperson for MAGA Inc. “We’re not going back to their record inflation, open borders, and surging crime.”
MAGA Inc. is sitting on more funds than any other super PAC, and Republican donors and battleground candidates have been hoping it will unleash that money to help the party keep control of the House and Senate.
So far, the group has only spent only a few million dollars out of its massive fundraising haul, and its funds have largely gone to competitive Republican primaries. Most recently, it spent $827,000 on phone calls and text messages to boost Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.) in the state’s special primary.
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