The public’s reviews of the centerpiece of Donald Trump’s domestic policy agenda started coming in well before Trump signed it into law on Friday afternoon, and they’ve been overwhelmingly negative: Just 27% of registered voters support it in a Quinnipiac University survey, 38% support in Fox News poll, 36% approval from Morning Consult and 23% in a survey from The Washington Post and ABC News. All four surveys show a solid majority of the public opposes the legislation.

The central ideas in the law — cutting taxes for the wealthy while slashing health and food aid for the poor and pouring money into an increasingly unpopular deportation machine and exploding the federal debt — are astoundingly unpopular. Their passage this week has Democrats promising political revenge, even openly dreaming about shattering the working-class coalition Trump crafted.

But for backlash to the legislation to deliver political benefits to Democrats, they need to do more than convince voters to oppose it. They need to let voters, especially those who consume more TikTok than traditional television, know it exists in the first place.

And there are warning signs Democrats’ battle against Trump’s signature proposal is becoming a replay of the 2024 election, when the voters who engaged the most with news and politics overwhelmingly backed then-Vice President Kamala Harris while those who avoided the news or engaged little backed now-President Donald Trump.

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“I think that people who are watching politics and concerned about our democracy are following this closely and understand what an abomination the bill is,” Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) told HuffPost on Wednesday night as House Republicans whipped their members into line. “But for you know, people that are just trying to live their lives and get by, I don’t think they realize that their health care, food assistance, environmental programs are all about to be gutted in just a few short hours.”

Clearly, Democratic messaging is breaking through at least somewhat: Two GOP members of Congress — Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska — announced their retirement this weekend, giving Democrats a better shot at winning each of their toss-up seats in a 2026 midterm where the political environment is already expected to favor their party, giving them an excellent chance of winning the House and at least a puncher’s chance of winning the Senate.

“Poll after poll has found that the Republican budget bill is widely unpopular, so it’s safe to say that opposition messaging has broken through to some extent. The more voters learn about this monstrosity, the less they like it,” said Ryan O’Donnell, the interim executive director of the progressive polling outfit Data For Progress, noting the group’s surveys found most voters expect the legislation to increase their family’s cost of living. “Democrats must seize upon the bill’s baseline unpopularity and continue to brand it for the huge mistake that it is.”

At the same time, a new poll from the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA will provide fresh fodder for the party’s significant bedwetting contingent.

The poll found 48% of Americans have not heard anything about the bill, including 56% of voters who flipped from supporting former President Joe Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024. The key dividing line? Interest in news. Roughly two-thirds of voters who passively consume the news or actively avoid know nothing about the legislation.

“Americans are 4x as likely to have heard about Iran bombings as they are to have heard about Medicaid cuts in the bill,” the group wrote in an accompanying memo. “Awareness of the GOP bill is limited, diffuse and general in nature, at best.”

The aforementioned survey from Morning Consult has a similar finding. While a sizable 38% chunk of the public says they’ve heard or read a lot about the bill, knowledge of the details is scarce, with only 17% of the public saying they’ve heard a lot about the legislation’s Medicaid cuts.

The results have some Democrats blaming journalists for not covering the legislation more — Center for American Progress head Neera Tanden declared on social media it meant the news media “failed” — even though those consuming news coverage have an overwhelmingly negative opinion of the bill.

Nick Ahamed, the deputy executive director of Priorities USA, said the results point to how both the news media and the Democratic Party have failed to adapt to a media environment where algorithmic video dominates most people’s consumption and attention is a scarce resource.

“Arguing whether it’s the medias’ fault or Democrats’ fault is missing the point — it’s the algorithm’s fault and everyone needs to figure out how to adapt,” Ahamed said.

In an interview, Ahamed said the results show the need for Democrats to get more comfortable delivering something other than poll-tested talking points in safe environments, noting voters who backed both Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024 have heard more about the bill than any other group of voters.

“I would rather Democrats go talk about the bill in 100 different ways, in 100 different places where there’s some sort of connection to that audience, rather than ‘Oh, we need to be on message, talking about Medicaid’ and only doing that in the places where we are talking about news of the day,” he said.

Priorities USA, in particular, noted messaging about the legislation on Bluesky — a Twitter alternative loved by progressives — would do little good. Voters using it are already well-informed about the bill, and the platform’s reach is limited. Similarly, appearing on podcasts already beloved by liberals won’t do very much.

Democrats directly involved in the 2026 midterm battle portrayed the messaging campaign as still in its earlier stages, noting hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent on television and digital ads defining the legislation between now and November. One consultant pointed out the midterm electorate is likely to be heavy on older and more educated voters, who tend to be paying closer attention to the news.

“This is more of a 2028 problem than a 2026 one,” the consultant, requesting anonymity to speak frankly about party strategy, said.

Indeed, a larger collection of Democratic groups released their own more optimistic memo on the situation Tuesday, encouraging Democrats to stick to one story, focused on how Republicans are taking things — affordable health care, cheap energy, food stamps — away from voters while handing tax cuts to the wealthy. Oh, and you should mention costs are high.

“Current research across issue areas and from different perspectives suggests the most effective approach to increasing opposition to the bill is to leverage concerns over rising costs,” the groups wrote. “This is the context for our attack. Now, as the bill approaches potential final passage and receives more attention from the media and public, we must double-down on this winning strategy through focused and repetitive messaging on what Americans have to lose.”

Sticking to this one frame, the memo argues, is crucial to reaching those voters who don’t follow the news: “By aligning to this one story across a diverse set of issues we will reach Americans who consume news passively with a simple, compelling story. This story will help voters make sense of this bill and the priorities of the Republican majority in Washington.”

Republicans, meanwhile, are still hoping they can convince voters to see the good in a package they largely loathe, with various GOP groups arguing a focus on relatively small provisions — the temporary elimination of taxes on tips, for instance — and arguing Democrats were prepared to let taxes rise for working families will help sell the legislation.

“House Republicans will be relentless in making this vote the defining issue of 2026,” the group wrote in a memo of its own. “The NRCC will use every tool to show voters who stood with them, and who sold them out.”

Arthur Delaney contributed reporting.