Democrats Already Have Plan to Fight Back Against Trump After Midterms

Health care has emerged as the chief priority for Democrats should the party wrest control of the House and Senate this November.

In an interview with NBC News published Wednesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries outlined four policy goals that he believed would attract “uniform Democratic support.”

“We have to reverse the Medicaid cuts. We should extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits,” Jeffries said. “We should restore congressional authority as it relates to tariffs, because the Trump tariffs are making life more expensive for the American people. And we should end, decisively, if it’s still going on, Donald Trump’s reckless and costly war of choice in the Middle East.”

But there’s still a long road ahead. Virginia Representative Don Beyer told the network that while there’s consensus that the party’s first post-election bill should focus on affordability, there’s little agreement on exactly what that should look like.

“In the affordability debate, nothing’s more central to it than health care,” Beyer told NBC News. “My expectation is that it’ll very much be about affordability one way or the other.”

Yet a growing contingent of Democrats—including the party’s emerging cohort of democratic socialists—want the party to aim higher on health care than the low-hanging fruit of reversing Trump’s unpopular cuts.

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—a rumored 2028 presidential candidate—said it would “absolutely not” be enough to restore Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.

“Of course, we need to take immediate action on those ACA subsidies and making sure that we lower those prices immediately,” Ocasio-Cortez told NBC News. “But it doesn’t fix the deeper systemic issue that has led health care to be one of the primary drivers of inflationary costs over the last decade, frankly.”

“We need to be doing a lot more to take on corporate power, to break up a lot of these monopolies that are rolling up—Big Pharma, insurance, private equity entering the space of health care unchecked,” she continued. “I think there’s a lot here for us to really dig in on, to work on.”

Successfully enacting the agenda (and unravelling Trump’s Project 2025 victories) will be dependent on the size of the party’s Election Day wins. If Democrats fail to win a significant number of seats in either chamber or are forced to contend with a thin majority, they’ll face seismic challenges in passing any sort of anti-Trump legislation.