Though the relentless whirl of Jeffrey Epstein revelations has knocked President Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill out of the headlines, it doesn’t look like voters have forgotten about the recent GOP spending bill.
On Friday, CNN Data Analyst Harry Enten warned House Republicans that the bill they passed last month could come back to bite them next year.
After Wolf Blitzer showed a clip of GOP Rep. Bryan Steil’s catastrophic town hall in Wisconsin on Wednesday, during which voters savaged him for his vote on the bill, Enten confirmed that the mood in the town hall was representative of voters’ broader sentiment toward the legislation.
“They hate the Big, Beautiful Bill,” Enten said on The Situation Room. “They absolutely hate it.”
To back up his analysis, he showed a series of four polls from the past month that collectively put the bill’s net approval rating far underwater.
Respondents gave the bill a -22 percent net favorability rating in CNN and CBS polls, a -19 percent rating in a Fox poll, and a -10 percent in a relatively rosy Wall Street Journal poll.
Enten explained that the severity of Americans’ negative reaction is unlike anything he’s ever seen before, including after Republicans passed major tax cuts in 2017 (many of which the Big, Beautiful Bill makes permanent).
Comparing polling from 2017 after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was passed, Enten showed that the average favorability rating for the Big, Beautiful Bill was twice as negative as the average reception to the TCJA.
“Simply put, it’s one of the most unpopular—if not the most unpopular—bills I have ever seen passed and signed into law when it comes to the budgetary process.”
In Enten’s eyes, the awful polling could mean only one thing: Republicans are in for a bloodletting in the run-up to the 2026 midterms.
“That town hall is just the beginning of what we’re gonna see,” said Enten. “Constituents just eating those representatives alive on the Big, Beautiful Bill.”
Betting markets currently give the Democrats a 71 percent chance of winning back the House in 2026.
