Bring it.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The tax bill is President Donald Trump’s biggest legislative victory this year, but Democratic strategists are already planning how to turn it into his biggest liability.
The emotional trigger they think will work on voters at next year’s midterm elections: arguing the bill is profoundly unfair by giving the lion’s share of benefits to corporations and the rich.
“Be careful what you wish for,” Tom Steyer, a Democratic billionaire, said of Republican leaders in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday. “They wanted this, they should have never have wanted it. Now that they’ve got it, they’re going to wish they didn’t.”
Steyer said he plans to use his money – through his political group NextGen America – to attack the Republican tax overhaul, using social media and online advertising aimed at young voters, a strategy that recently helped elect Democratic candidate Doug Jones in a Senate race in Alabama and Ralph Northam as governor of Virginia.
In November 2018, elections will be held for all 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and for 34 seats in the 100-member Senate.
Pollsters believe the midterms could be a rare “wave election,” when one party seizes back control of Congress. It happened for Republicans in 2010 and 1994.
If Democrats are able to pick up two more Senate seats, they will take control of the chamber. And after the wins in Alabama and Virginia, they are even hopeful they could tap into anger over tax cuts for the rich to win control of the House.
Only about 29 percent of voters approve of the tax bill, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in mid December. Slightly more than 52 percent oppose it. In no region of the country did even half of the people polled say they support it.
The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee is already running anti-tax plan ads in several key states including Nevada, Arizona, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.