The most unpopular budget law ever? | Weekly roundup for July 6, 2025

Last week in political data: Work requirements don't work; The unpopularity of the GOP budget law; Angry discourse online; and Democrats winning back young voters

Happy Sunday. One quick flag before we get into it: It’s poll time! Send in any questions you’d like to see added to our monthly Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll via this form or our chat here on Substack, by Tuesday morning. Read the June poll here.

Now, here are the top stories from Strength In Numbers and the data-driven political analysis community over the past week:

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Medicaid paperwork requirements don’t work

Usually, I talk about political polls and election results in this newsletter. This week, I wanted to share a story on hard data about Medicaid, and the impact of additional document requirements.

I saw the following chart in Paul Krugman’s Substack this week. I posted it on social media and it got a lot of attention — I think because most people do not realize how many children receive Medicaid:

But the big point of the chart is not about the kids. It’s that the vast majority of Medicaid recipients are not non-working adults. According to the Census Bureau, only 3% of the dollars paid out by Medicaid in 2022 went to people who weren’t working long term.

That is important because this is the group the Republicans say they are going after with their huge Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Yes, the tiny pink sliver at the bottom of the graph. But the policy change they are enacting will end up depriving a lot of people in the green bubbles of health care, too. The policy changes are detailed here, and include a lot of additional burdensome paperwork requirements both for people who are of working age, and for families. That means kids are likely going to lose health care, too.

The chart above comes from a New York Times guest essay opposing Medicaid work requirements from economist Matt Bruenig. Bruenig makes the argument that these requirements are cruel (not least they kick people off insurance after they get fired, at exactly the point people may need a new health care plan), and more importantly, ineffective. Study after study finds that adding burdensome paperwork requirements to Medicaid ends up kicking people off health insurance who are otherwise eligible, simply because they don’t have the time or the information for the paperwork.

Non-partisan sources estimate that 16 million people are going to lose their health insurance because of the GOP budget, and the vast majority of those are not going to be “unworthy” recipients who “don’t deserve it.” It’s important for people to realize the policy here is not going to do what the people who passed it say it will.

For transparency, I’ll be honest about my personal biases here: My four siblings and I grew up on food and health care support from the government (WIC and CHIP) in rural south Texas. I remember how hard my parents worked to put food on our table and a roof over our heads. In one formative memory, I wake up and the light in the living room is on. It’s so late at night, I think it’s the next morning, so I wander out of my bedroom to start my before-school routine. In reality, it must have been 1 or 2:00 in the morning and my mom is still up folding laundry. I can’t imagine my parents had any more time to fill out onerous paperwork — especially the bullshit forms required now just so Steve Scalise can say he’s going after gamer bros who live with their parents. I feel for all the kids living like that today who are going to lose benefits.

Meanwhile, a new Kaiser Family Foundation report shows Medicaid has an 83% favorability rating.

With policy as poorly tailored and unpopular as this, you have to think there will be political costs for the Republican Party next year. (This would be a good time to launch a generic ballot polling average…)

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What you missed at Strength In Numbers

SIN published three articles last week:

• A Tuesday post for paying members on the very strong pro-Trump “house effects” of Republican-aligned pollsters, and how that impacts Trump’s approval average

• Our first guest post from contributor Jesse Richardson on enthusiasm among Democratic voters in special elections, using data from the Florida voter file

• And on Friday, a Chart of the Week compiling all the polling on the One Big Unpopular Bill.

  • ICYMI: I joined Chris Hayes’ show on MSNBC Friday night to talk about this piece and the midterms.
    

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Even more numbers!

A bunch of stuff on the GOP budget bill:

• A line-item analysis from the New York Times Upshot blog of how much each policy change in the bill costs or saves

• Another Upshot article about the impact of the bill on annual incomes/transfers for Americans in different income groups. This article is helpful because it also contains historical comparisons that other writeups don’t have.

• A nice podcast from my former colleague Galen Druke about the political consequences of the bill. I like his framing of Trump “campaigning on populism but governing in conservatism,” though I’m not sure exploding the deficit by $4 trillion counts as “conservative.” Edmund Burke would not have voted for the OBBBA.

• The Economist has published ten charts that explain Trump’s budget bill. Here’s one that very elegantly shows how the law trades off spending on welfare for the poor so it can fund tax cuts and new spending on ICE and homeland security:

  

July Fourth and national pride:

• Philip Bump writes a nice article for the Washington Post this week on polling data showing Republicans turning away from pluralism. Half of Republicans now say immigrants “threaten” (rather than “enrich”) American culture, up from 21% in 2019.

• According to a new Gallup poll, pride in America is at a recent (perhaps all-time) low. Just 58% say they are “extremely” or “very” proud to be an American. Democrats are less proud (36%) than independents (53%) and Republicans (92%).

Other data points:

• A new study finds people are really angry online (shocker!). This is mostly a post-Trump thing, and Republicans are angrier in their Tweets than Democrats are. Republican elites are the angriest group in the country.

• An analysis in the Times shows how Zohran Mamdani increased new voter registrations and youth electorate composition in the NYC Democratic mayoral primary. Looks like he just about doubled ballots for voters under 30.

  

• Sunbelt and New England swing states moved left in 2025. J Miles Coleman at the UVA Center for Politics points out that Sunbelt swing states, including Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, were more Democratic than at any point in the last 20 years relative to the nation as a whole. That was true for New Hampshire and a few other unsuspected states as well, including Alaska and Kansas. Here’s a map:

  

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Updates from the data portal

• Trump’s approval rating is down:

  

• Including for key issues:

  

• And economic growth remains lower than average, new despite stock market highs

  

The charts on the data portal update every day. Feel free to use and cite them liberally!

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And that’s it for this week!

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Elliott