Democrats are rerunning the playbook that won them control of Congress in 2018, focusing on the cost of the G.O.P.’s tax cut plan for ordinary Americans, particularly when it comes to health care.
In 2018, Democrats won back the House, flipping 41 seats including in conservative-leaning places like the suburbs of Utah and Oklahoma by focusing narrowly on a single issue: Republican efforts to overturn a popular health care program, the Affordable Care Act.
Now, as Republicans push a budget resolution through Congress that will almost certainly require some kind of cuts to Medicaid to finance a huge tax reduction, Democrats see an opening to use the same strategy.
“I don’t know why Republicans are doubling down on the same playbook,” said Senator Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, who in 2018 served as the chairman of House Democrats’ campaign arm.
“The town halls, people coming forward, showing up in communities all across America, filling the phone lines here in Washington, D.C.,” Mr. Luján continued, “I think you can draw a direct comparison to the outcome of what happened in 2018.”
In the early weeks of President Trump’s second term, Democrats labored to pick their political targets amid a near-daily barrage of executive orders and moves by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to defund and dismantle federal programs and fire government employees. But in the prospect of cuts to Medicaid, which covers more than 70 million Americans, they see a clarifying issue that they hope can help them capture the same kind of energy that catapulted them back to power in 2018.
“The American people were upset in 2005 when Republicans tried to privatize Social Security. The American people were upset in 2017 when Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, said in an interview, citing two campaign cycles in which his party wrested back control of the House under a Republican president. “The American people are very upset right now, including in the communities I represent, about the Republican effort to take away their health care and enact the largest cut to Medicaid in our country’s history.”