GOP voters’ fealty to Trump makes it 'politically safe to take away their benefits'

Senate and House Republicans appear to hope unswerving voter devotion in red states will blunt blowback from extreme cuts they’re planning for the nation’s safety net. And a New York Times analysis suggests the public might just buy it.

The budget proposal House Republicans sent to the Senate this month “cuts hundreds of billions of dollars in food benefits and removes nearly 11 million people from the health care rolls, while offering large tax cuts skewed to the rich and adding trillions to the national debt,” say analysts. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are considering a measure with bigger Medicaid cuts and smaller reductions in nutritional aid.

Cuts they’re recommending for Medicaid and SNAP would be the largest either program has ever seen, according to reports, with the House version reversing almost three-quarters of the decline in the uninsured rate President Obama and Democrats managed to achieve. The House version of proposed work rules would remove 3.2 million people from the rolls, the Congressional Budget Office found, while other provisions cut or end aid to an additional 1.5 million. Together, that is about 11 percent of the whole program’s caseload.

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But Republicans are hoping to avoid blowback by delaying the pain until after mid-terms, and voters may just forgive them their destruction and blame Democrats, as they have before.

University of Michigan political scientist Michael E. Shepherd pointed out that hospital closures fell in states that expanded Medicaid, as Obama and Democrats had anticipated, but they rose in red states like Mississippi, where Republicans rejected expansion. However, voters in red states blamed Democrats because Obama was president. Shepherd said communities where rural hospitals closed increased their support for Republicans by 10 to 15 percentage points.

Similarly, when Republicans reversed Democrats’ child tax credit increase — which gave cash assistance to millions of low-income parents and cut child poverty to a record low — few voters protested, says The Times.

“I think it’s genuinely unclear whether voters who lose Medicaid or SNAP would blame Republicans,” said Hunter Rendleman, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Many in the MAGA base have such a strong relationship with President Trump, it may be politically safe to take away their benefits. I’d call the political risk for Republicans medium.”

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But Rendleman said the betrayal can only go so far before a significant number of peripheral non-MAGA voters take notice and hand incumbent Republicans the political “suicide” that Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo) fears.

“Polarization interferes with the feedback loop, but I still think there’s some room to sway the marginal voters,” Rendleman said.

Read the full New York Times report at this link.