GOP Voters Are Divided Over How to Extend Trump’s Tax Cuts

As House Republican leaders struggle to advance President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda via one big reconciliation package, their budget blueprint suggests social safety net programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program could be trimmed to help pay for an extension of the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts.

Their approach has already proven divisive among Republican lawmakers, and that’s also the case among the party’s rank-and-file voters nationwide.

Our latest survey shows GOP voters are evenly divided at 26% when asked if Republicans in Washington should either cut the two programs or increase the budget deficit to pay for the extension. Another 22% of the party's voters said the tax cuts should not be extended at all.

Among the overall electorate, more voters than not would extend Trump’s tax cuts, but they’re more likely to prefer an increase in the budget deficit than cutting Medicaid and SNAP (27% to 18%). Another 32% would not extend the tax cuts at all.

This comes after our survey last week showed few voters — including Republicans — believe the SNAP or Medicaid programs should receive less funding.

The bottom line 

For now, Washington’s tax talks are not top of mind: Over the weekend, about 1 in 5 voters (22%) said they’ve recently heard “a lot” about congressional Republicans' efforts to advance Trump's tax, immigration and energy agenda on Capitol Hill, ranking it near the bottom of news salience among 60 events tested since Trump took office.

This could give the Republicans in Congress, who are only slightly more trusted than their Democratic counterparts to handle taxes (46% to 43%), some initial cover to work out their differences on their top legislative priority for the year. 

Those differences essentially amount to what GOP lawmakers think is worse: putting the country further into debt or weakening the social safety net. And though our latest findings suggest little consensus among Republican voters on that question, what’s clearer is that the broader electorate prefers the former over the latter.

Given the expected political dynamics in next year’s midterm elections, both options look likely to result in some amount of voter backlash, though if recent history is any indication, the fiscally liberal approach is a safer route.