In New Jersey, the political battle over the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ is just beginning

When Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) voted last week for his party’s enormous tax and health care bill, he said he’d delivered “a huge win for New Jersey” – and his Democratic opponents crowed that he had cast the vote that would cost him his seat.

The “One Big Beautiful Bill,” as the GOP’s legislative agenda has been dubbed, covers an extraordinarily large amount of different policy issues, ranging from Medicaid funding to tax deductions to border security funding to green energy to the debt ceiling. And as New Jersey gears up for a competitive 2026 election cycle – at least two districts, one of them Kean’s, are likely to be heavily contested – both parties see major political upsides to the bill, which may still change quite a bit in the Senate before it becomes law.

In other words, New Jersey Democrats and Republicans alike seem to think they’ve found a winning issue in the battle for control of Congress. They just have to make sure voters get the message.

From the outset of GOP negotiations on the bill, Democrats have been sounding the alarm over potential cuts to Medicaid, the massive health care program for low-income and disabled Americans. And the bill that passed last week does indeed reduce federal funding for Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars, with the result being that 8.6 million people could stand to lose health coverage (or 13.7 million if the expiration of some Affordable Care Act subsidies are factored in), per the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

In New Jersey specifically, state health officials have estimated that 360,000 New Jerseyans or more could lose Medicare coverage, prompting all four Democrats actively running campaigns against Kean – party activist Brian Varela, former Summit Councilman Greg Vartan, former Biden administration official Michael Roth, and Navy veteran Rebecca Bennett – to excoriate the 7th district congressman for his vote (a vote that proved decisive, since the bill passed 215-214).

“Tom Kean Jr. is a coward, and he is a liar,” Vartan said the day after the bill passed the House. “If this passes the Senate, this will be disastrous. People will not be able to have access to health care; people will not be able to afford their food; and people will die.”

Republicans, though, counter that what Democrats frame as Medicaid “cuts” are in fact policies to strengthen Medicaid: creating new work and volunteer requirements, adding safeguards against undocumented immigrants and other ineligible recipients, and otherwise ensuring that only those who deserve Medicaid get it. (Federal Medicaid dollars don’t cover undocumented immigrants in most cases, but New Jersey allows children to access NJ FamilyCare regardless of their immigration status, a policy for which they’d be financially penalized under the GOP’s bill.)

“When you translate what [Democrats] are saying to the truth of what this bill does, they’re asking for taxpayer-funded dollars to cover health care for illegal immigrants,” said Harrison Neely, a Republican strategist who has worked closely with Kean for years. “Tom Kean made a commitment in his last campaign to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, and that’s exactly what this bill has done, and it’s ultimately made a stronger system for the people who need it most.”

Polling shows that voters respond very differently depending on how the Medicaid issue is framed. One poll from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation found that 76% of Americans oppose “major cuts to federal funding” for Medicaid like the ones made by the bill. But another poll from the GOP pollster Fabrizio Lee found dramatically more support for some of the specific policy changes made by the bill: 72% of voters in competitive congressional districts support work requirements for Medicaid and 68% support “strengthening Medicaid eligibility integrity.”

For those who aren’t directly affected by the changes to Medicaid, then – which is likely true of many people in Kean’s 7th district, an affluent seat that has the lowest number of Medicaid recipients in the state – the battle over the One Big Beautiful Bill’s effects on health care may come down to a messaging war.

Then there’s the bill’s tax provisions. During the negotiation process, Kean was one of the key holdouts who insisted on a higher SALT cap, saying that his highly taxed constituents needed relief in order for him to support the bill; the deal he and his fellow pro-SALT Republicans reached with GOP leaders quadruples the cap from $10,000 to $40,000, which Kean has claimed as a major win.

“It took a lot of guts for him to stand up to leaders of his own party, much less the roster of people running against him, and deliver the first real tax relief that people in the district have seen in a long time,” Neely said. “He has fully restored the SALT deduction for every middle-class family in the district. That’s what he voted for.”

There is a catch, though: the SALT cap, put in place by Republicans during President Donald Trump’s first term, would have expired anyways at the end of this year without congressional action. Kean may have gotten the best deal he could have in Republican-controlled Washington – many conservative Republicans had no interest in raising the SALT cap at all, and it still faces a rocky road in the Senate – but Democrats will say that’s still not good enough.

“What Tom Kean talked about doing for years is standing up for taxpayers in the 7th district and fighting back against the SALT cap. What he just did is vote to affirm a SALT cap,” said Dan Bryan, a Democratic strategist who is working with Bennett’s campaign this cycle. “That is not in the interests of his district; that is in the interests of Donald Trump.”

Republicans have also emphasized other tax policies like the elimination of federal taxes on tips and boosts to the Child Tax Credit as evidence that the bill will put more money in middle-class families’ pockets; Democrats have countered with a study showing that, when all of the bill’s provisions are accounted for, the wealthiest Americans will see their incomes rise while the poorest will see them fall.

Kean isn’t the only New Jersey representative whose vote on the bill has become a political football. His swing-district colleague from the opposite party, Rep. Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon), joined with the rest of her caucus in opposing the bill – and Republicans think she could pay a political price for it.

The National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC), which has put Pou’s Trump-won seat on its 2026 target list, recently released an ad arguing that Pou’s vote against the bill constitutes support for “the largest U.S. tax hike in generations,” since the bill includes an extension of the tax cuts Trump signed into law in 2017.

“Nellie Pou’s radical vote is unacceptable,” NRCC spokesperson Maureen O’Toole said. “Instead of doing her job and making her constituents’ lives better, she just voted to raise their taxes, take away their jobs, and undermine our national security. New Jersey voters will consistently be reminded of this betrayal all the way through next fall.”

History suggests, though, that their anti-Pou message may be a tough sell as long as Democrats are out of power in Washington. Back in 2017, Republicans attacked Democratic incumbents for voting against their tax cut bill, saying that they opposed tax relief for their constituents – but not a single Democratic House member ended up losing re-election in 2018, with voters instead focusing on what their Republican representatives had voted for.

Democrats, too, hope that the political effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill extend beyond just Kean, whose seat was always designed to be the state’s most competitive. Just this morning, a Democratic group released an internal poll of Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis)’s conservative-leaning South Jersey district that found that a Medicaid-focused message moved voters away from Van Drew by several points.

And the bill is so far-reaching that there are plenty of other issues that could become political winners for both sides. Republicans can say Pou voted against hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for border security and defense priorities like a U.S.-Mexico border wall and the construction of new Navy ships, because she did. Democrats can say Kean voted to phase out many of the clean energy tax credits that had been funding green energy projects around the country, because he did, even after advocating against doing so.

Eventually, come November 2026, all of these debates will be placed in the hands of voters themselves. But it’s a long road from now until then, and Bryan said that if Democrats want the One Big Beautiful Bill to be a winning issue in their fight to take back the House majority, they have to be willing to hammer Republicans with it over and over again.

“Republicans’ policy platform is wildly unpopular and out-of-step with the American people,” Bryan argued. “But they are the best in the business at giving you a bag of shit and trying to explain to you, ‘These are actually freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.’ That is what they do. They’re very good at it.”

“But at the end of the day,” he added, “it’s a bag of shit.”