Sen. Jon Ossoff easily defeated a challenge from Republican Rep. Mike Collins to hold on to his Georgia Senate seat on Tuesday, according to AP projections.
After Donald Trump carried the state in 2024, early forecasts predicted tough sledding for Ossoff. But during a brutal government shutdown — the longest on record — the senator signaled he was willing to stake his candidacy on protecting Affordable Care Act subsidies, and he proved an adept campaigner who was hyper-focused on Georgia issues. Ossoff focused his stump speeches around affordability, skyrocketing inflation and foreign entanglements, hammering Trump for his costly war with Iran.
For his part, Collins’ candidacy was hamstrung by controversies involving his payroll and affiliation with alleged white nationalists.
Frequently floated as a 2028 contender, Ossoff adopted a fighter’s stance at his campaign events. Like feisty Michigan candidate Abdul El-Sayed, the senator took every opportunity to land a jab against Republicans, occasionally causing some monocle-popping among centrist commentators still holding on to the idea of the dignity of the presidential office. In August, he drew jeers and applause for making light of the rumors surrounding Trump aide Natalie Harp.
“So [Trump] doesn’t want to do this job,” Ossoff said . “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”
Ossoff, for his part, has said he has “zero interest in running for president.” His victory speech, which will come later tonight, will be studied by pundits seeking to divine his intentions.
As frequent readers of Where Things Stand and therefore TPM you don’t really need another rundown from me on just how out of touch President Trump is when it comes to the everyday needs of Americans. We’ve known it for decades.
Republicans wanted the 2026 midterms to be a victory lap for Donald Trump’s tax cuts. Instead, the GOP’s signature legislation from the president’s second term — 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act — is shaping up to be a sleeper vulnerability for the party.
When Republicans first passed Trump’s signature bill in party-line votes in both the House and Senate in 2025, its tax cuts took effect immediately, while the deepest cuts to Medicaid were scheduled for after the midterms, when the voters who would feel them could no longer hold anyone accountable. But even then, one of their own issued a warning that now hangs over the midterms. North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who announced his retirement after indicating he would oppose the legislation, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the bill would result in losses of the kind Democrats suffered in 2010 after passing Obamacare.
Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act anyway. Now, across social media, Americans are sharing stories of children cut off from cancer treatment and families struggling to afford prescriptions.
On Tuesday, Children’s Mercy Hospital announced that families in the Kansas City metropolitan area who buy coverage on the Affordable Care Act marketplace will find the region’s only dedicated children’s hospital out of network on Jan. 1 — a devastating development for parents whose children depend on specialized care. It is also the kind of story that can demolish incumbent Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall’s carefully constructed distinction between cutting government spending and hurting actual people.
The story went viral fast. Influencer Jen Hamilton’s video walking viewers through what the Children’s Mercy Hospital news means for families drew 3.2 million views across three social media platforms and was shared on Facebook at 73 times her average rate. Kasey Jackson, a Kansas City mother whose son is being treated for cancer, posted a series of videos explaining that her family’s marketplace plan would stop treating his hospital as in-network when the new year arrived. Jackson explained that she previously sold her small business to pay for her son’s leukemia treatments, but had few options left with no health plans to choose from. “As entrepreneurs, we don’t really have access to a group plan, so we have to go through the [Affordable Care Act] because there’s nobody that will provide private insurance for a kid with a pre-existing condition,” she explained. One clip passed half a million views.
The Children’s Mercy news arrives at an especially dangerous moment for Marshall, who has found himself in the middle of a re-election bid that was never supposed to be competitive.
The Children’s Mercy news arrives at an especially dangerous moment for Marshall, who has found himself in the middle of a re-election bid that was never supposed to be competitive. Kansas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, and Trump carried it by 16 points in 2024. Yet the Cook Political Report moved the race to a toss-up this month, and an Emerson College poll gives his challenger, Adam Hamilton, a Kansas City-area megachurch pastor running on the cost of living, a two-point lead.
Republicans have quadrupled their ad spending in the state since late September, a move that must be particularly galling for the party because as a physician, Marshall should have been inoculated against a healthcare attack. Instead, the OB-GYN specialist’s career choices have come under heavy scrutiny.
In September, The New York Times reported that Marshall’s former practice had sued more than 700 of its own patients over unpaid bills, some as small as $101, and that 81 people were arrested as a result. Hamilton’s campaign built an ad around Meischa Zimmerman, who says she was arrested while eight months pregnant after missing a $50 payment, and found herself pleading not to be handcuffed in front of her two-year-old. “Roger Marshall preyed on the low-income families of Kansas,” she says. The ad has been viewed more than a million times on X. Marshall’s lawyers have called it defamatory, demanding it come down, saying the debt was larger and the arrest was for missing court dates. Marshall himself told cameras there were “no Medicaid cuts” in the law he voted for, dismissing the Times’ reporting as a “hit job.” A doctor-senator insisting the largest Medicaid cut in American history does not exist, while his own brutal record of collecting fees runs in heavy rotation, is the Big Beautiful Bill’s national problem in miniature.
But the social media outrage is not confined to one hospital or one state. The issue is also the number one subject in Senate advertising and the number two issue in House advertising, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report’s Battleground Issue Tracker, which found that Democrats are airing tens of thousands more ads and spending tens of millions more on the issue than Republicans, who have all but declined to defend their own law. GOP candidates in competitive races have run a total of four television ads about the Big Beautiful Bill since its passage, according to AdImpact.
Still, a POLITICO poll released last week found an overwhelming majority of voters know the law and oppose its contents, with their views slightly worse than when the bill was passed and signed into law. At the time, a KFF survey found opponents outnumbering supporters two to one. Since then, the White House’s attempt to rebrand the package as the “Working Families Tax Cuts” has moved almost no one, per the same POLITICO poll.
The problem for the GOP is that voters do not have to agree with every Democratic argument about healthcare to dislike paying more for their own insurance. In a KFF health opinion poll conducted in June, 37% of Republican voters said healthcare costs were extremely important. More than half of Republican and Republican-leaning independents who identify with the MAGA movement said Congress had done the wrong thing by allowing enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire, according to KFF polling released in March. Among marketplace enrollees, 62% blamed Republicans or Trump for the expiration.
Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance recently announced that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had canceled ACA enrollments covering 760,000 people, citing claims of widespread fraud. The Trump administration views its focus on fraud in federal health programs as a message that will resonate with voters. A KFF poll in mid-September found that 44% of voters and 54% of Republican voters call fraud in government programs extremely important for candidates to address, and a separate KFF and Associated Press survey found it was the top topic rural Republicans want to hear about. The administration withheld about $2 billion in Medicaid funding from California, and announced plans to defer more than $500 million in federal funds from Minnesota, claiming the state had failed to protect its Medicaid program from abuse.
Republicans are betting on energizing their base — and hoping to pull along persuadable voters. Polling, however, points the other way. A fraud crackdown may be the top concern for Republican-leaning voters, but only 44% of voters overall call it extremely important, according to KFF, which found healthcare to be the top issue for the electorate at large.
Some of the largest disruptions from the Big Beautiful Bill Act that Republicans scheduled for later are being moved forward by state budgets. Because the law shifts enormous new costs onto states in the coming years, some state lawmakers are cutting now to brace for the shortfall. Colorado, facing a $1.5 billion hole, has cut what it pays doctors who treat Medicaid patients. In Maine, a hospital has eliminated its labor and delivery unit. The $50 billion rural health fund that Republicans added to the bill at the last minute amounts to a fraction of what rural communities stand to lose from the same law.
Democrats who have made the bill’s Medicaid cuts a leading message are tied or leading in many battleground races, including in states Trump previously won. In Georgia, ACA enrollment dropped by more than half a million, hitting Trump strongholds like the district in northwestern Georgia formerly represented by Marjorie Taylor Greene, where the number of uninsured is higher than the national average. Incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., has been laser-focused on hitting GOP cuts on the campaign trail all year. In Maine, incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins is being attacked by Troy Jackson, her Democratic challenger, for casting a procedural vote to advance Trump’s cuts to Medicare and Medicaid to a Senate floor debate.,Although Collins voted against final passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, Jackson argues her vote helped pave the way for its enactment. In the House, California Rep. David Valadao’s Central Valley toss-up district, where roughly six in 10 constituents are enrolled in Medicaid, could help give Democrats control of Congress. Valadao, a Republican, voted for the Big Beautiful Bill. During a televised Oct. 6 debate, he said there are no actual cuts to Medicaid. His Democratic challenger has supported Medicare-for-All.
The GOP’s scramble explains why, weeks before the election, the Trump administration began mailing one-time payments of $500, along with a letter from the president touting his health record, to more than 950,000 people in the 30 states that use HealthCare.gov. The money comes from accumulated marketplace user fees, but only enrollees who bought coverage without premium subsidies qualified, which means roughly one in 20 marketplace customers received a check while the rest got the higher bills. Trump has also promised every American adult $5,000 if Republicans keep Congress, and Medicare beneficiaries have been told to expect $90.
But it is not just drastic healthcare cuts driving voters’ alienation from the GOP. An analysis published Thursday showed that millions of Americans have lost critical food assistance since Trump signed last year’s massive Republican tax giveaway for the superrich, with soaring grocery prices and cuts to school meals exacerbating the crisis. According to a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, approximately 5.5 million people, including roughly two million children, have lost Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program assistance since July 2025. SNAP participation and spending have been falling, and the decline is much deeper than the Congressional Budget Office initially projected. These are by far the deepest SNAP cuts in history, and each month, new data reveals the damage is worse than previously anticipated. Republicans have responded that a slight reduction from an explosive increase is hardly a cut, and they have cheered SNAP participation returning to pre-pandemic levels, ignoring the mounting human toll.
As Election Day approaches, the reality of these policy choices has turned the GOP’s signature legislative victory into a major political liability. The strategic miscalculation of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is getting harder for conservatives to contain. By forcing millions of Americans to choose between basic medical care and daily necessities, Republicans transformed tax cuts for the rich into a personal crisis unfolding on screens and in living rooms nationwide.
Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi always said that the only way for Democrats to win elections was to focus on the proverbial “kitchen table issues.” As the leader of the caucus for 20 years, she had quite a track record, presiding over quite a few big wins and many small ones, so she knew what she was talking about. According to her way of thinking, people are motivated to vote over concerns about their own material well-being, and in recent years, this has meant healthcare, job security and the cost of living — the basics.
Republicans, by contrast, tend to rely on a broader appeal to security in general. “Law and order” has been their bumper sticker, covering a wide range of free-floating anxieties in American society having to do with cultural changes, race and the loss of status of straight white males. Their answer to economic stress comes down to blaming the bogeyman of the day, whether it’s immigrants or the deficit, and the answer is always tax cuts and more tax cuts.
Democrats have usually been trusted more on the kitchen-table issues, depending on whether they happen to be in office when some kind of economic crisis hits. Jimmy Carter paid a high price, losing his 1980 re-election bid after having inherited crippling stagflation from his GOP predecessors, and was hit with a big recession as a result of the Federal Reserve policies — which he supported — to break it. His successor, Ronald Reagan, reaped the benefit, a common consequence of painful Democratic policies necessarily deployed to clean up a Republican administration’s economic mess.
The GOP enjoyed 12 years in the White House after Carter’s loss, including a big boom which inevitably turned into a recession and helped ensure Bill Clinton’s victory over George H.W. Bush in the 1992 election. Clinton presided over an economic boom that saved his presidency, which was otherwise dogged by scandals largely perpetrated by the GOP’s final evolution from the party of mainline Protestants and main street business owners to one of ruthless street-fighters.
Economics, of course, aren’t the only issue that motivates voters. While more abstract notions of foreign policy and national security are rarely at the top of the agenda, war certainly can be. George W. Bush learned this in 2006, when the American people finally realized the Iraq war was a disaster. But something else was looming on the horizon. Bush had also made the fatal mistake of trying to privatize Social Security, breaking whatever trust people had in Republicans to safeguard their hard-won benefits. The Democrats won the midterm election in a rout.
Two years later, Barack Obama was hit with a double whammy. The war in Iraq was still the top issue, but at the height of his campaign against Arizona Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee, the bottom fell out of the housing market and the world suffered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the same time, the healthcare crisis had reached a crescendo, with millions of people going bankrupt, and many suffering and dying due to the high price of insurance. After his win, those kitchen-table issues were front and center in shaping Obama’s presidency. In fact, two years into his first term, as the Great Recession continued to drag on, the American people let out the equivalent of a political primal scream and gave Democrats what Obama famously admitted was a “shellacking” in the 2010 midterms. Perversely, this was largely caused by the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the party’s healthcare plan, underscoring that no good deed goes unpunished.
Then came Donald Trump. When he announced his candidacy for president in 2015, the economy was on the upswing, and just enough people were gulled by his phony reputation as a great businessman and promises to make everyone rich that he eked out an Electoral College win. Once in office, Trump basically just rode the recovery that was already underway and took credit for it. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit and his incompetence fully manifested itself, voters turned against him. If there was ever a kitchen-table issue, the pandemic was it: We were all stuck sitting around the table for months, wondering if the world was ever going to be the same. Trump failed to rise to the occasion.
But he was elected again after Joe Biden presided over the pandemic’s economic recovery, which was painful, ushering in inflation for the first time in decades to a chunk of a population that had never experienced it. The issue did him — and his vice president, Kamala Harris, who replaced him on the ticket — in, returning Trump to the White House on the promise that he would restore the economy to the alleged golden age of his first term. Unfortunately for America and the world, enough people bought into Trump’s chicanery once again, and here we are today in a crisis of chaos, mistrust, incompetence and despair over the radical policies wrought by a second Trump administration.
Kitchen-table issues are still at the top of most voters’ lists. The cost of living remains high and keeps climbing. Housing is out of control, and gas prices are through the roof due to Trump’s war of choice with Iran. His much-ballyhooed tariffs have helped keep inflation high, and there is now little doubt what is driving the polls showing that Republicans are about to take a drubbing in the November midterms.
But the concept of kitchen-table issues has its limits. Not everything in life is actually about money, and people’s perceptions of the economy are often colored by other issues that don’t appear at first glance to be directly related.
But the concept of kitchen-table issues has its limits. Not everything in life is actually about money, and people’s perceptions of the economy are often colored by other issues that don’t appear at first glance to be directly related. Bush’s losses in 2006, for instance, were affected by his mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War, both of which contributed to a sense that the administration suffered from hubris and incompetence. There is little doubt that the backlash against Obama during his first term was also driven by the recoil on the right to his identity as the first Black president. Trump likewise benefited from the fact that misogyny and racism were in play in his victories over the first two women to win the nominations of a major party.
The problem is that Democrats have too often relied solely on the kitchen-table issue agenda and failed to address underlying anxieties that contribute to their distress. And with Donald Trump, they are legion.
The unrelenting pandemonium of his presidency, from his brutal immigration crackdown to the flagrant corruption and degeneration of the president himself, as manifested in his obsession with gold and the building of personal monuments in a time of economic stress, is making the public depressed and angry. The fact that Trump broke one of his fundamental promises to not get the country into a war, as he whines constantly about being denied the Nobel Peace Prize, is maddening. His ongoing disregard of the rule of law and the assault on the democratic process are obvious. The disconnect between what average Americans are feeling and the way their leaders are behaving is a mile wide.
People have been yearning for a holistic explanation for this chaos and confusion — and Democrats have finally found a way to express it. As POLITICO recently noted, Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, along with Senate candidates Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and James Talarico of Texas, as different as they are individually, are “leaning hard into anti-corruption messaging in the final weeks of the campaign as new research suggests that linking corruption to Americans’ economic struggles can boost Democrats into the home stretch.”
The corruption argument is compelling. Beyond the hated war in Iran (and its resulting gas prices), Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and old friend Steve Witkoff’s deals in the Middle East have come under scrutiny and outrage, as have the government contracts being handed out to companies in which Trump’s sons are invested. Pardons are being sold to anyone with enough cash, some of them to people convicted of healthcare fraud, even as the Republicans are cutting Medicaid and healthcare subsidies. Contrary to his blarney, Trump’s Louis XIV-style monuments to himself are being largely paid for by the taxpayers. On top of all that, there are the reports that Trump has made $2 billion since returning to the White House, a figure that is excessive, even for him.
The shameless grifting is too obvious for voters to overlook, and the Democrats have finally realized that the critique of Trump and MAGA Republicans must go beyond the kitchen table because it is all connected. The chaos, incompetence, deceit and self-dealing are at the heart of America’s distress, and it’s benefiting Trump and his cronies at the expense of average taxpayers.
Distilling all this into a media-ready indictment, a soundbite, is difficult, but “Washington is rigged to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyday Americans” is about as good as it gets. Let’s hope Democrats can carry this message of reform past Election Day and actually do something about it.
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