‘You gotta fight’: Dems declare midterms battle has begun

WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans are breathing sighs of relief after passing President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Democrats aren’t going to let them relax for long, though.

“Are you celebrating?” Raw Story asked Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-FL). “Happy?”

“I’m celebrating it’s over,” the former mayor of Miami replied.

Democrats believe the GOP seriously miscalculated by falling in line behind Trump on his spending and tax cuts package so many Republicans decried.

“There's something different about this moment that I think Republicans are not recognizing, and that is, people are tuned in more than they know,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) told Raw Story.

“People are really, really disturbed by this. This is not what they — even the people who voted Trump — this is not what they voted for.”

Midterms are here

Ads have already been airing coast to coast, attempts to shame vulnerable Republicans into derailing the sweeping measure, which also vastly boosts Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

On Thursday morning, throughout House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ (D-NY) record-breaking speech against the bill before its final vote, progressives could be seen shooting campaign-style videos. Others were live-streaming with concerned supporters.

Now, Democrats are gearing up to make the multi-trillion dollar bill the centerpiece of next year’s midterm elections.

"I will tell you, the last few weeks … there isn't a place that I have been to where people aren't concerned about this,” McGovern said.

“Airplanes, and I trained it up to New York … I had about half a dozen people on the train, ‘Oh, you gotta fight this stuff.’”

With an estimated 17 million Americans slated to lose health insurance under the GOP overhaul, according to the Congressional Budget Office, Democrats are outraged yet hopeful their party finally has the opening it needs to start to win back sizable chunks of the electorate Trump made historic gains with in the 2024 election, like his historic gains — for a Republican candidate — with Black and Latino men.

To Democrats, the GOP isn’t just tone deaf: they say the party is alienating the very minority communities Trump wooed by reverting to stereotypical and antiquated tropes, like increasing work requirements for Medicaid recipients.

“It's the ‘undeserving poor,’ [the] ‘guy playing video games’ and the ‘welfare queen,’” Rep. Joe Courtney (D-CT) told Raw Story.

As Republicans delivered soaring speeches throughout the night, Democrats were left wondering if they had been transported back in time.

“I was in the Assembly in Connecticut back in the 80s — it’s like, ‘Wow, I haven’t heard that stuff in a while,” Courtney said as he left the Speaker’s Lobby, just off the floor of the House.

While Trump campaigned as a populist, he surrounded himself with tech billionaires who paid for much of his inauguration. Now many of those billionaires are in his cabinet, others just a phone call or text away.

With rank-and-file Republicans lambasting millions of Americans who depend on the federal government for health insurance or food assistance, Democrats see an opening for good old -fashioned empathy.

“It's fear mongering on others and immigrants. And, like, total bad faith bulls—t takes from the 90s,” Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) told Raw Story. “I really think people see through it.”

On Wednesday evening, after a cable news hit with a Republican colleague, Ryan said he couldn’t keep it in anymore.

“It's definitely retread BS. I actually said to my colleague after the interview, I was like, ‘Do you actually believe that?’” Ryan recalled.

“In this case, he's from Nebraska. He's got 100,000 people on Medicaid. Like, do you really believe that all those people are lazy and unemployed?”

Ryan’s starting to think many Republicans actually believe their own rhetoric.

“I actually think they lie to themselves and don't actually wrestle with it,” Ryan said. “So it's pathetic.”

‘The old rhetoric is the new rhetoric’

On Capitol Hill, partisanship has become so bitter, there’s not much that shocks veterans like 14-term Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA).

That’s why Sherman says he’s not surprised when Republicans perpetuate racist and sexist stereotypes.

“The very fact that it's a trope — am I surprised that somebody said something that hundreds of hundreds of times has been said before? Nope,” Sherman told Raw Story.

“But is it disappointing?” Raw Story pressed.

“Of course it’s disappointing,” Sherman said.

Disappointing, yes — but also not that different.

“It's like the old rhetoric is the new rhetoric,” McGovern said. “They don't have an original thought in their heads.”

Rather, McGovern argues, today’s Republican Party bends to every wish and whim of Trump.

Take the July Fourth timeline the president demanded of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), for the passage of his “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

It was a totally arbitrary date, but senators stayed in session all weekend and into the wee hours of the morning, just to appease the president.

Not to be outdone, Speaker Johnson cut his chamber’s annual July Fourth recess short, calling the House back into session.

Just as they did when tanks were rolling through Washington's streets for Trump’s recent military parade, Democrats are rolling their eyes while watching the GOP contort and convulse, scrambling to make Trump happy.

“This artificial deadline is, you know, Trump wants to throw another party for himself. That's it,” McGovern said. “None of these Republicans have a backbone in their body — not a single one of them.”