Ted Cruz says Americans want Republican “good policies.” Polls and household budgets tell another story as Trump’s agenda raises costs and cuts protections.
Summary
Ted Cruz went on Meet the Press and suggested that Americans want Republicans to continue putting what he called “good policies” and “good jobs” in place. That assertion clashes with the political and economic realities Americans are living in. Trump’s approval has fallen to roughly one-third, voters increasingly trust Democrats over Republicans on the cost of living, and the Republican agenda has made healthcare, food assistance, education, energy upgrades, and other necessities harder or more expensive for millions of families.
- Cruz calls Trump-era Republican policies “good” while voters increasingly reject their results.
- Republicans expanded Medicaid bureaucracy and work requirements that threaten coverage.
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They tightened SNAP while shifting additional costs onto states and struggling families.
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They eliminated consumer tax credits for EVs, solar panels, and home efficiency upgrades.
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Polling shows affordability—not Republican culture-war rhetoric—is dominating voters’ concerns.
Cruz can describe Trump’s agenda as successful, but Americans ultimately judge policy at the grocery store, the pharmacy, the hospital, the utility meter, and the family budget. Right now, that judgment is increasingly brutal for Republicans.
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Ted Cruz Has a Fantasy About Trump’s Policies. Americans Are Living the Reality.
Ted Cruz appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press selling a political fantasy.
Talking about the midterms, Cruz declared that he thinks “most Americans want to see good policies, good jobs put in place.” The statement sounds innocuous until one asks the obvious question: Which Republican policies does Cruz believe Americans are clamoring to preserve?
Because Americans are sending a very different message.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released just days ago found Democrats holding an eight-point advantage over Republicans on handling the cost of living, 36% to 28%. An earlier August Reuters/Ipsos survey found roughly 70% of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of both inflation and the cost of living. Trump’s overall approval subsequently fell to 33%, matching the lowest level of his presidency.
That does not look like an electorate begging for more Trumpism.
It looks like an electorate that understands what its checking account is telling it.
Consider the Republican reconciliation law Trump signed in 2025. It imposed sweeping changes on Medicaid and SNAP while handing Washington another round of tax policy heavily favorable to those who need government assistance the least.
Medicaid recipients face expanded work-reporting requirements and more frequent eligibility checks. KFF estimates the Medicaid provisions will increase the number of uninsured Americans by about 7.5 million in 2034, with approximately 5.3 million of those losses connected to the new work requirements.
Republicans call that reform.
A working parent who loses healthcare because paperwork did not get processed calls it something else.
The same legislation tightened SNAP and shifted additional financial responsibility to states. The Congressional Budget Office concluded that reductions in Medicaid and SNAP benefits decrease resources available to affected households. CBO also notes that states facing higher SNAP costs can offset these costs through higher taxes or cuts elsewhere.
Then Republicans attacked another pocketbook issue: energy costs.
Trump’s law accelerated the termination of the federal tax credits for new and used electric vehicles. It killed the residential clean-energy credit after 2025 and ended the home energy-efficiency credit years earlier than previously scheduled. The IRS confirms that the residential clean-energy incentive had covered 30% of qualifying investments such as solar and battery storage.
In plain English, Republicans removed incentives that helped families spend less on transportation and household energy.
And now Cruz wants Americans to applaud the “good policies.”
Meanwhile, affordability has become perhaps the defining issue of the 2026 election. Reuters/Ipsos found that nearly half of Americans identified the cost of living as their most important consideration when deciding how to vote. Democrats now lead Republicans on that issue after the parties were essentially tied at the beginning of the year.
That movement matters.
For decades, Republican politicians sold voters a remarkably effective fiction: give corporations and wealthy Americans favorable tax treatment, deregulate aggressively, weaken the social safety net, and prosperity will somehow cascade downward.
Working people have spent decades waiting for the cascade.
Instead, they got medical bills, student debt, expensive housing, an insecure retirement, stagnant bargaining power, and an economy increasingly designed to extract wealth from people who work and transfer it to people who own.
Progressives should not merely tell voters that Trump and Cruz are wrong. They must clearly offer the alternative: healthcare people can afford, strong public schools, lower prescription costs, affordable housing, worker power, competitive markets, clean, inexpensive energy, and a tax system that requires the wealthy to contribute their fair share.
Cruz thinks Americans want more of Trump’s policies.
The polling suggests something very different.
Americans want their lives to become more affordable.
And increasingly, they understand who is standing in the way.
