The News
DALLAS – Republicans arrived at their first midterm convention ready to sell their wins for “working class” Americans, including hundreds of billions of dollars for tax cuts, refunds, and savings accounts.They left it ready to spend another trillion dollars in direct payments to Americans – if voters are smart enough to re-elect them.
“Five thousand dollars for every adult,” President Trump said on Thursday, suggesting that a “Trump dividend” would go out if the GOP kept control of Congress.
Democrats found plenty to ridicule about Dallas 2026, from the strategic absence of most swing-seat GOP candidates to the empty tier of seats that the president pretended not to see. They also got a clear view of their challenge. Republicans have a president happy to adopt (or take credit for) populist ideas that his party used to blanche at – and candidates who would follow him for every beat.
Trump’s party promised to take on “big tech” and “big insurance,” as Democrat-turned-MAGA hero Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called them. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis., celebrated the money Republicans put into their state’s Medicaid system, and promised a “Great American Health Care Plan” that would supplant Obamacare – details tbd. “We actually took on big pharma and lowered drug prices,” Vice President Vance said on Thursday. “We banned corporate tycoons from buying up our housing stock.”
As they denounced “communism,” Republicans thanked Trump for forcing drug companies to lower their prices, a Democratic initiative re-branded as TrumpRx. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., led cheers for a ban on “congressional insider trading,” a popular bipartisan cause that Democrats got cut out of. (House Republicans passed a version of a ban that excluded the executive branch, a dealbreaker for Democrats.)
And they sold and sold the “Working Families Tax Cut,” the re-brand of their tax law’s benefits to tipped workers, laborers who get overtime, and families with dependent children. A voter who only tuned into the midterms on Wednesday would have never heard about the law’s tax cuts for businesses and higher earners.
“Billionaires aren’t working for overtime, and they’re certainly not being paid in tips,” said Donald Trump Jr.
Trump’s float of a $5000 “dividend” if Republicans won the election epitomized the party’s new thinking – and willingness to do what he said. Starting on Wednesday night, after the president mentioned the tax, some members of Congress either endorsed it outright or suggested that it would be turned into another kind of benefit for workers — though its path to actual law is vanishingly impossible to see — though its path to actual law is vanishingly impossible to see (The president’s suggested, convincingly enough for Republicans on the trail, that he could do it anyway.)
“If you keep us in power and allow us to continue to do these things, then you’re going to share in some of the benefit of this incredible wealth that we’re creating,” Vance told Fox News on Wednesday. But more Republicans suggested that the $5000 was on the way, paid for by tariffs – though the cost of the checks would vastly outstrip what the government had collected.
“Right now, people are hurting,” Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga. told CNN, explaining why he opposed a $1400 stimulus check in 2021 but would support a $5000 check in 2026. “They need more money in their pockets. And this is a way to get more money to them.”
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David’s view
If Republicans lose in two months, it’ll be easy to explain why. Voters were anxious about the cost of living. The war in Iran spiked their anxiety, by hiking gas prices. Tax refunds that they spent long before they voted weren’t top of mind, and neither were the cultural issues where they differ with the Democrats.
Those cultural issues were all over the Dallas agenda; Vance used part of his Thursday night keynote to imply that James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, was a pervert “obsessed with trans kids.” But beyond the “communism versus common sense” frame of the convention, which Republicans had previewed all year, you could hear how the party made itself robust against a Democratic comeback.
Republicans have given up nothing from large donors – they were all over the American Airlines Center, where every piece of wall art had been covered by an image of Trump. They’ve also embraced populist, anti-immigration, low-tax policies, and tariffs that labor unions support more often than not.
Those were stumbling blocks for donors in 2016. Not anymore. This is, despite the polling, a sweet spot for the GOP, and we’ve seen Democrats respond to these deficits-be-damned politics by proposing their own middle class and working class tax cuts. Being out-flanked on “no tax on tips” and “Trump accounts,” ideas that came up but were never enacted when they last had power, complicated their hopes of winning back lower-income voters who’ve now backed Trump three times.
Room for Disagreement
Democrats said that the Trump offer would flop – all of it, but especially the $5000 dividend offer that so excited Republicans. Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., pointed out that Trump had previously suggested that he might send voters tariff and dividend checks, and never did.
“He said that he’ll give adult Americans $5,000 if they reelect Republicans to Congress, and that is a bribe,” Crow told Semafor. “That’s not okay. They would be losing their damn minds if any Democratic president ever said something remotely like that. So it’s wrong, and Americans know it’s wrong.”
Notable
- Shane Goldmacher and Reid J. Epstein talked to the Republicans wary of sending more than a trillion dollars of checks to taxpayers. The loudest critics – Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C. and Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas – won’t be in Congress next year.
- NBC News’s Henry Gomez reported on the vice president’s closed-press meeting with convention attendees, urging them to “nationalize” the elections around the Trump message.
- Elsewhere in Semafor, Ben Smith recapped an off-site debate between conservatives about the threats created by AI.