Say goodbye, it’s Independence Day
By It’s hard to describe the passage of the Defund America (Except for the Billionaires) Act as anything but a failure of democracy:
The OBBBA is also historic in another way: It is likely the most unpopular budget ever, is the second most unpopular piece of key legislation since the 1990s, and the most unpopular key law, period, over the same period.
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Note that support for the bill maxes out at 38%, or -15 in terms of the margin between support and opposition. The bill’s net rating is generally worse the more specific a pollster gets about what it does. Net support for the bill has also trended upward since it was first introduced, as Republicans have rallied around it in support of their party leader.
Yet it is still hopelessly underwater. On average across pollsters and methods, 31% of Americans support the One Big Beautiful Bill, while 54% oppose it. That net rating of -23 is, to put it mildly, absolutely abysmal. That’s true in both absolute terms (having a majority against you with just a third in support is terrible!) and comparative terms.
According to data compiled by Georgetown’s Warshaw, the OBBBA is the second most unpopular piece of key legislation since 1990, and likely the most unpopular budget (I have to say “likely” because we don’t have polls of every budget proposal) ever. Here are the net support/oppose numbers for a bunch of bills Warshaw has tracked over time:
According to the polls, the only bill more unpopular than this year’s GOP budget bill is the 2017 Republican health care bill, which would have killed the funding mechanism for the Affordable Care Act, cut $800 billion from (basically eliminating) Medicaid, and slashed taxes on high earners.
In addition to incredibly specious process complaints (about a bill that passed after months of bipartisan negotiations), critics of the ACA loved to note that it was unpopular when it passed. But 1)it was not nearly this unpopular, and 2)Pelosi was in fact correct that most of its individual components were very popular and that the legislation would become more popular after it went into effect and people could see the benefits. The major components of OBBBA, on the other hand, poll from “unpopular” to “less popular than getting repeatedly hit on the head with a 2×4.” It’s not going to get more people when people find out what’s in it, quite the opposite. Republicans just don’t care, and an electoral map in the upper house that is egregiously skewed in their favor while having more power than the more electorally accountable one is a big part of the story.
The Trumpian rejoinder to this, needless to say, is just to tell massive lies about it.
Happy 4th of July!