Thom Tillis’s retirement is an ominous sign for the GOP
Trump's big bad bill is already damaging the party.
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North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis announced yesterday he will not run for reelection next year, meaning the GOP’s hold on a key seat in a purple state is increasingly tenuous.
Tillis’s exit from the race appears to be directly related to his inability to navigate the politics of the ongoing GOP reconciliation bill process. As such, it’s the first warning sign that Republicans’ massive cuts to Medicaid and social programs could lead not just to widespread death and misery for their constituents, but also to electoral disaster for the party.
Ugly numbers
Tillis’s retirement came after the first Senate procedural vote on Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill.” The tax and spending bill extends the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy, adds even more tax cuts for the wealthy, and spends a massive $168 billion on Trump’s border wall and ICE detention. It (partially) offsets that with a horrific $1.1. trillion in Medicaid cuts, and an additional $185 billion in cuts to federal food assistance programs. And even so, it adds $2.8 trillion to the deficit.
The social safety net cuts will be devastating. Analysts believe that 13 million people will lose insurance coverage. Horrifically, the bill is expected to result in more than 16,600 excess deaths every year. The cuts are expected to lead to massive closures of hospitals, especially in the very rural areas that disproportionately voted for Donald Trump and his ghoulish Republican Congress.
Most people would prefer not to lose their healthcare; they are also adverse to watching their loved ones die preventable deaths. And they especially dislike enduring pain and suffering so that there’s more money to line the already stuffed pockets of the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Polls reflect the fact that this bill is a debacle. Democrats hate the bill; when its provisions are explained fully, they oppose it 91 percent to 6 percent. Independents don’t like it either; 80 percent oppose it to 8 percent who support it. But stunningly, even Republicans dislike the massive giveaway to the rich, and oppose the bill 61 percent to 23 percent.
Tillis looked at those numbers and blanched. He’s facing a very difficult fight in North Carolina, where former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is expected to be a strong opponent. Trump won North Carolina in 2024 by about three points; Democrats are currently overperforming in special elections by about 13 points.
You don’t need to be a mathematical genius to figure out what those numbers portend for 2026 — nor do you need to be a genius to see that a horrifically unpopular tax and spending bill which robs people of their healthcare and hospitals is likely to make things worse. North Carolina, specifically, is expected to lose $40 billion in Medicaid funding from the federal government if the cuts go through.
Tillis assessed the damage and concluded that he did not want this bill to pass — or at the least, that he did not want to be associated with it.
“This will be devastating to my state,” Tillis is reported to have told Senate Majority Leader John Thune. He announced on Saturday that he would not vote for the bill to proceed, and would oppose it on final passage.
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The first victim (of many)
Thune was no doubt unhappy about Tillis’s choice. But leadership often allows one or two vulnerable senators to oppose an unpopular bill if they can get over the finish line without their votes. It seems likely Thune was giving Tillis a pass because the Senate majority leader did not want to lose a key seat.
Enter that bumbling orange fascist toddler America elected president.
Trump — who of course has no idea how the Senate works — saw Tillis’s vote not as a strategic effort to retain the majority, but as a personal betrayal. He took to Truth Social to bellow that Tillis had “hurt the great people of North Carolina” by trying to protect their hospitals and health care. He added that “numerous people have come forward” who want to primary Tillis and that he would be “meeting with them over the coming weeks.” (The last high profile North Carolina politician Trump backed was scandal-ridden, self-described “Black Nazi” weirdo Mark Robinson, who lost the governor’s race by an embarrassing 14 points.)
If Trump hoped Tillis would cave, he was disappointed. The senator from North Carolina just shrugged and announced his retirement.
“In Washington over the last few years, it's become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species,” he said, indulging in the typical gormless senatorial both sides nonsense we’ve come to expect from our political leaders.
But whatever Tillis’s rhetoric, it’s clear that his actions were a rebuke to Trump — and to MAGA’s ugly, murderous policies.
Not just Tillis
As Republicans have spiraled into fascism, they’ve become less and less concerned about popular opinion.
When confronted with constituents demanding she oppose a bill that would cause mass death, for instance, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst responded callously, “we all are going to die.” Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell argued that the GOP should just ignore public opinion; people who lose Medicaid, he said, would “get over it.”
Republicans have long had a huge built in advantage in a Senate which gives massively disproportionate influence to rural white voters. As partisanship has increased, ticket-splitting has become less common, which means Democrats have a tougher and tougher time competing in Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Montana — red states which sometimes sent Democrats to the Senate not that long ago. All of this insulates Republicans, who increasingly care only about the hardest of their hardcore base.
In addition, as political scientist Jonathan Bernstein explains, tax cuts have been the core of the Republican agenda for going on 40 years. Republicans also like cutting social services. The priorities of Trump’s big bad bill are the priorities of the entire Republican caucus — and the party is desperate to prevent the 2017 tax cuts from sunsetting, since that would involve the ultimate evil, a tax increase.
More, Republicans need to pass a debt limit increase or default and destroy the economy. But many hard-line Republicans hate debt limit increases, and won’t vote for them on their own. The tax cut extensions and the debt limit at the heart of the bill are, in Bernstein’s words, a “must-pass.”
And yet, even in a hard-red Senate, even on a must-pass bill, Tillis is not the only Republican who sees some disturbing writing on the wall. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said, “We can’t be cutting healthcare for working people and for poor people in order to constantly give special tax treatment to corporations.” (He then went ahead and voted to advance the bill cutting healthcare for working people.)
Republican Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski has been worried that changes to Medicaid and SNAP requirements would devastate her state. She tried to get Medicaid funding carve outs for Alaska but the Senate parliamentarian ruled some of them violated the rules. Other Republican senators (like Maine’s Susan Collins, who also faces a tough reelection) are surely also getting pushback from constituents.
Even as special elections for Republicans get more and more bleak, even with Democrats up a stunning eight points in the generic ballot for the House, Democratic control of the Senate seems like a long shot. And yet, thanks to a reconciliation bill fight which forced a key Republican senator into retirement, those odds just got a good bit less long than they were a week ago.
There’s no doubt that the bleakly unpopular MAGA Murder Bill will hurt Republicans, because it has seriously hurt them already. Will it damage them enough to allow Democrats and progressives to seize Congress and reverse our flatulent descent into fascism? We have no way of knowing. In the meantime, our only option is to continue to pressure vulnerable senators like Collins, Murkowski, and maybe even scythe-wielding death cheerleader Joni Ernst in hopes of blocking the worst provisions of this unpopular, cruel, and evil budget.
That’s it for today
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Doesn't sound like you or anybody else was very successful in moving the perpetually "concerned" Collins and the cowardly hypocrite murkowski.
Heather Cox Richardson noted that Susan Collins usually steps out as the third person, waiting for at least two others to go out on the limb ahead of her. I'm not sure that with Senator Tillis' decision not to run again, if she will wait for an additional person to step out before deciding if she will deign to vote against this brutal, destructive bill. Any Republican who plans to vote against it should say nothing--taking a page out of John McCain's playbook--not to mention avoiding the pressure from the Orange One and his sycophants, and dramatically vote no.