Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 1000 time, you are a stupid dumb fuck!

The GOP’s hopes of a tax cut election are falling flat, poll shows

A new POLITICO Poll finds that even as Republicans promote their tax cuts and rebrand their megabill as “Working Families Tax Cuts,” their message isn’t breaking through.

By Bernie Becker

Republicans once thought tax cuts would save the midterms.

But with less than three weeks until Election Day those hopes seem to be coming up short: New results from the POLITICO Poll show the sweeping tax and domestic policy package rammed through Congress by President Donald Trump and Republicans are not resonating with voters. Not even a rebranding of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” to “Working Families Tax Cuts” is turning things around.

In fact, fewer than one in 10 Americans name the tax cuts as among the biggest successes of Trump’s second term.

It’s not, the results make clear, the tax cut election that Republicans wanted.

While 70% say taxes are an important issue, only 9% say it is the most important, as rising costs of living, the ongoing war in Iran and other concerns overshadow Republicans’ signature legislative accomplishment of Trump’s second term.

Republicans continue to plug last year’s tax cuts on the trail, and voters even have a positive view of the name “Working Families Tax Cuts.” But there is more energy behind potentially repealing that law, which also slashed Medicaid to help offset the cost of tax cuts, as Democrats appear on the brink of regaining at least some levers of power in Washington.

Colin Reed, a GOP strategist, said that the 2025 megabill would likely be a durable achievement for Republicans — but one that they wouldn’t necessarily get rewarded for politically this November, no matter their messaging.

“Elections are more about the future than the past,” said Reed. “Even if people and small business owners are happy that their taxes didn’t go up in 2025, they also want to know what’s going to happen in 2027.”

Republicans originally labeled last year’s megabill the One Big Beautiful Bill Act after Trump’s description of the decision to pack most of the party’s fiscal priorities into a single legislative vehicle.

But within weeks, GOP leaders decided that branding wasn’t going to cut it.

That’s when they started calling it Working Families Tax Cuts, an ode to the law’s new deductions for tipped income, overtime pay, new car loan interest and for seniors that were paired with extensions of individual tax relief from Trump’s first term.

The new polling from PF Global found that voters have warmed to that new description. When asked if they would support or oppose the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” based on what they know, just 30% of respondents said they would back the law. But when asked the same about the “Working Families Tax Cuts,” support jumped to 40% of respondents.

That’s not strictly a partisan response, either.

Democrats are more likely to support than oppose Working Families Tax Cuts, while the opposite is true of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. In fact, Americans overall were more than four times as likely to say they strongly opposed the big, beautiful bill (22%) than they were to say they opposed tax cuts for working families (5%).

But there’s a catch: Few voters overall are aware of the GOP’s rebranding effort.

Only about one in five respondents said they knew about and could describe the Working Families Tax Cuts. Another 31% were aware of it but not totally sure what it was, and 49% were completely in the dark.

Perhaps because of its head start, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is better known. About 70% of people said they’d at least heard of it, with nearly a third responding that they knew it well.

All of that makes it no surprise then that Republican officeholders and interest groups are trying to make the Working Families Tax Cuts more of a brand, plugging it by name as they try to survive a potential Democratic wave.

Candidates are also more likely to promote their support for individual portions of last year’s tax cuts, like the tip and overtime deductions.

Republicans in competitive races have only run four total TV ads using the phrase “big beautiful bill” since the beginning of last year, according to an analysis of data from the tracking firm AdImpact. Three of those ads aired in South Carolina last year, boosting the since-deceased Sen. Lindsey Graham’s role in passing the bill.

The party is leaning much more heavily into the rebranded “working families tax cuts,” having run 32 ads using the phrase, with a recent uptick in the final two months. But even those ads represent a sliver of $410 million Republicans have spent on tax messaging: The party more often leans into a cleaner form of messaging around the bill’s core selling points and has spent $75 million on ads referencing either to taxes on tips, taxes on overtime, or taxes on Social Security payments.

Reps. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) and Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa), both of whom are running for the Senate, are among the candidates who have talked up both the more popular provisions and the broader law in recent weeks.

Hinson has said that she would quickly move to extend provisions like the four personal deductions that Trump campaigned on in 2024.

“On day one, I want to introduce legislation that would make the Working Families Tax Cuts bill permanent,” she said this month.

For their part, Democrats have been more likely to hammer Republicans about the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with about half of their 32 ads on the issue running at least once just since the start of September. But like Republicans, that’s also just a small portion of the almost $200 million that Democrats have funneled toward tax advertising.

Even if taxes were more central to the midterms, it’s not clear that would give Republicans a huge leg up, the poll finds.

Voters are giving the GOP credit for the deductions for tipped income and overtime pay, which are popular enough that Democrats looking at the 2028 race have been recalibrating their potential presidential platforms.

But overall, they still narrowly associate Democrats more with cutting taxes for working Americans — 38% to 32% — even with the new title for the 2025 law.

“No tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime” are also less important to Americans than other tax issues on which they’re more likely to align with Democrats, like hiking taxes on billionaires.

And Republicans get the blame for tax policies of growing concern among voters, like incentives for tech companies amid the growing backlash to the data centers fueling the artificial intelligence boom.

That environment has left Democrats like Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), who is favored to defeat Collins, feeling quite comfortable in sharply attacking the GOP tax cuts, dubbing them a giveaway to the rich that’s paired with cuts to the safety net for the poor.

There’s quite a bit of voter energy behind a potential repeal as well. The POLITICO Poll found that more than a third of respondents would be more likely to vote for someone who said they would repeal last year’s GOP fiscal package, as opposed to 20% who would be less likely.

“The problem with the Pinto wasn’t that the ad budget was too small. It was that the car kept catching on fire,” said Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson, comparing Republicans’ megabill to a troubled Ford model from the 1970s.

“Republicans passed their bill, voters lived with it, and now Trump’s underwater on the economy and the GOP has lost the trust on cost of living it had for a generation,” said Ferguson, who was a top aide on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.