Will Republicans in Virginia pay a price for the One Big Beautiful Bill? Here’s what the math shows.

To hear Republicans tell it, the enactment of the One Big Beautiful Bill heralds the onset of a new golden age through tax code changes that will spur more investment in manufacturing and energy production.

To hear Democrats tell it, the law will set in motion a health care crisis for those who lose Medicaid coverage, the closure of many rural hospitals that depend on Medicaid payments and higher energy prices because the bill eliminates the tax incentives behind 90% of new energy being added to the grid.

Time will tell who is right, but in political terms, we don’t have an unlimited amount of time — we have a little more than 16 months before the November 2026 congressional midterms (and in Virginia, with its early voting, a little more than 15 months before that balloting begins). Polls show the bill is unpopular, and even some Republican dissidents — notably Sen. Thom Tillis, R-North Carolina — have warned that it may cost Republicans their majority in the House next year. 

We know that historically, midterms cut against the president’s party, so Republicans are right to be wary. Recent history has shown that whatever big things a president with a trifecta in the House and Senate wants to do legislatively — from the Affordable Care Act under Barack Obama to the tax cuts under Donald Trump’s first term to the Inflation Reduction Act under Joe Biden — had best be done before the midterms, because the midterms might change the majority in Congress and make further legislative action impossible.

The question then — for both parties — is what impacts might we see out of this bill before those midterms? More to the point, who might get swept out of office because of this bill? I can’t speak to other states, so this analysis is confined to Virginia and its 11 congressional seats (and one Senate seat, Mark Warner’s) that will be on the ballot next year. First, let’s set the lay of the land. Here are the winning percentages of each of the incumbents in the most recent election, which for the House members is 2024 and for Warner 2020, arranged from most Democratic to most Republican:

*Connolly is now deceased. A special election to fill that seat is set for September.

What we see here is that the two most closely contested districts are the 2^nd (Kiggans) and 7^th (Vindman).

Reality 1: The incumbents in those two districts are always going to be vulnerable, no matter who they are or what year this is.

Reality 2: Some of these other incumbents are in such strongly red or blue districts that it is impossible for me to conceive of them losing office in some national tide, one way or another.

In practical terms, the question is whether a Republican wave can reach high enough to dislodge Subramanyam in the 10^th or Warner statewide, or whether a Democratic tide can reach high enough to wash away Wittman in the 1^st or McGuire in the 5^th. Given the candidates’ winning percentage, it’s easier for Republicans to knock off Subramanyam (in addition to Vindman) than it is for Democrats to pick up an extra seat beyond Kiggans’. Since history shows midterms work against the president’s party, I’m inclined to set aside the former question about a Republican wave and focus instead on what a Democratic wave might do, although I’m not going to ignore the prospects of a Republican victory entirely.

There are some things in the One Big Beautiful Bill that might motivate voters, regardless of district: Republicans will like the immigration enforcement, Democrats don’t like extending tax cuts for upper-income earners. Either of those could form the basis for campaigns across the country, although results may vary. In the 10^th District, 25% of the residents are foreign-born, according to the U.S. Census Bureau; how much will immigration enforcement resonate there for Republicans? Instead, I’m going to look at some specific things in the bill to see whether they might create unique conditions in certain districts. Let’s start with an issue favorable to Republicans, then move to the ones most often cited by Democrats.

Manufacturing

CNN reports that under the new law, “businesses will be allowed to fully and immediately deduct the cost of building new manufacturing facilities. This temporary provision is retroactive to January 19, 2025, and continues for construction that begins before January 1, 2029.”

Since manufacturing tends to be in Republican districts, this provision — if it works — is unlikely to help a Republican candidate in the Northern Virginia-based 10^th District but could aid Republicans in the 5^th, 6^th and 9^th districts (who, based on previous years, may not need that political help). How soon will we see the impact of this, though? Companies don’t suddenly decide one day to build a new factory and start construction right away. There’s a much longer lead time in corporate decision-making and site location. Let’s look at Google’s recent decision to build a data center in Botetourt County. While that isn’t manufacturing, it’s still instructive: Google began looking for a site in January 2024, didn’t buy the land until June 2025 and may not break ground until January 2026. That’s two years from first starting to look to first starting to move earth. Microporous, which is a manufacturing company, first started looking for a site for a new battery plant in at least November 2023 (that’s when the company’s interest was first reported, so their interest likely predates that) and, at last report, hopes to have the facility in Pittsylvania County open by the end of 2026 — that’s three years.

That means if a company decided today that those deductions in the One Big Beautiful Bill are incentive enough to build a new plant, it might be two to three years before we see new plants open. That won’t help Republican candidates in 2026, although it could in 2028. (This sets aside certain headwinds that manufacturers might face; I explored seven of those in a column earlier this year.)

Medicaid

Perhaps no part of the bill is more controversial than its changes to Medicaid. Trump, in his 2024 campaign, said he wouldn’t touch Medicaid. This bill touches it. The Washington Post reports that “The legislation’s deep cuts to Medicaid could force some nursing homes to shutter or scale back services, making it harder for seniors to find a spot in a facility.” The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has calculated that at least 17 million Americans could lose health coverage under these provisions.

I’m going to put nursing homes in a similar category as manufacturing above: We don’t know how quickly we’ll see those impacts play out. However, the 17 million Americans who could lose coverage is a more quantifiable figure, so let’s quantify things further.

KFF — formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation — has produced maps that show how many Medicaid recipients there are in each congressional district in the country. In Virginia, the two districts with the highest percentage of residents on Medicaid are the 4th (28%) and the 9th (24%). The 4th is already Democratic so, in crass political terms (my specialty!), if people there lose coverage, that wouldn’t change the district’s politics. That’s a solidly Democratic district to begin with. So what about the 9^th, our most solidly Republican district?

KFF says that about 189,500 people in the 9^th are Medicaid recipients, of which 32,100 are children — an important figure for us because children can’t vote. So that’s 157,400 adults. Another relevant statistic: Those who might lose coverage constitute 23.8% of Medicaid recipients. If that percentage is consistent nationally (it may not be, but I have no way of knowing), then 23.8% of the 157,400 adults in the 9^th District works out to 37,561 adults in the district losing coverage.

There are two ways to look at this. One is like this: That’s about the size of Tazewell County. Here’s the one I consider more relevant: Griffith’s winning margin last time was 181,075 votes. Even if those 37,561 Medicaid patients who might lose coverage had never voted before but now register and vote against Griffith, he’d still win by a landslide. If they were all previously Griffith voters and now switched, he’d still win by a landslide. Even if they were all previously Griffith voters and each persuaded three other Griffith voters to switch sides, he’d still win. 

The most recent House election, though, was during a presidential year. What about the lower turnout of a midterm election? In 2022, Griffith won by 116,180 votes. There still aren’t enough people losing Medicaid to make up that difference.

We also don’t know how many of those Medicaid patients are registered to vote — although we know that voting often tracks with income, so there’s a good chance many of them aren’t registered or, if registered, don’t vote in a nonpresidential election. We also know that some of the poorest counties in the district, which likely have higher percentages of Medicaid patients, have some of the lowest turnouts of registered voters (I’m thinking Buchanan and Dickenson, in particular).

Mathematically speaking, it’s hard to see how this vote for the One Big Beautiful Bill — even if it has the most negative ramifications Democrats warn about — endangers Griffith at all. It’s only if people who don’t lose benefits get exercised that it becomes a factor — and then only if those voters rank that issue a higher priority than any of the issues that might previously have led them to vote for a Republican (abortion, guns, immigration, taxes, a general dislike of Democrats, you name it).

What about Virginia’s other Republican members of Congress? Again, Kiggans is vulnerable no matter what, so the 124,700 people in her district who might lose coverage — 101,600 of whom are adults — could well make a difference. So could almost anything, given her winning margin of 15,702 votes. When Kiggans first won office in the 2022 midterms, her margin was even smaller: 10,109 votes. That’s why the 2nd (along with the 7th, now in Democratic hands) is the classic swing district.

What about Wittman in the 1^st, McGuire in the 5^th and Cline in the 6^th? Here are the numbers:

1^st District: 12% of the district’s residents are on Medicaid — 100,900 people, of whom 82,600 are adults. If 23.8% of those lose coverage, that’s 19,568 people. Wittman won last time by 61,212 votes and by 44,599 in the 2022 midterms. 

5^th District: 20% of the district’s residents are on Medicaid — 159,700 people, of whom 131,100 are adults. If 23.8% of those lose coverage, that’s 31,202 people. McGuire won last time by 65,335 votes. He wasn’t in office for the midterms, but his Republican predecessor, Bob Good, won by 47,195 votes. That’s getting closer to the number of people who might lose Medicaid coverage, but the numbers still aren’t there yet (and the same caveats about low turnout in some rural areas still applies). 

6^th District: 19% of the district’s residents are on Medicaid — 149,300 people, of whom 120,300 are adults. If 23.8% of those lose coverage, that’s 28,631 people. Cline won last time by 115,321 votes and by 77,942 votes in the 2022 midterms.

For the Medicaid provision to cost any of these members their seat, we’d have to see a widespread uprising by people who aren’t losing Medicaid. That’s possible, but I am skeptical, to say the least. Oh, and there’s this: Most of the changes to Medicaid don’t take effect until after the November 2026 midterms, so by the time it comes to vote, the people most affected won’t have felt anything yet. By the time the 2028 elections roll around, who knows what people will be thinking?

Hospitals

Hospital groups loudly warned that the changes to Medicaid would endanger many rural hospitals. To counter that, the bill created a $50 billion relief fund to mitigate the impacts. The downside, according to critics: That fund might not be enough and only lasts for five years anyway, so this is only a temporary solution, not a permanent one. In the end, members of Congress prioritized their desire to change Medicaid eligibility over concerns about rural hospitals. Politically, that seemed curious given how dependent Republicans are on rural districts, but let’s look deeper.

Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., produced a list of hospitals across the country that he said were at risk of closing. To make the list, hospitals had to meet at least one of two criteria: a large percentage of Medicaid patients, and/or they’ve lost money for three straight years. In Virginia, six hospitals made the list — this is where Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger has gotten the figure she’s been citing about how six rural hospitals might close.

Here’s the list, followed by my caveat:

Disclosure: Carilion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.

All these hospitals are losing money, except for Lee County, for which no data is available, according to Markey’s letter. My main caveat is this: None of these are independent hospitals; they’re all owned by chains — which already know they’re losing money. Those chains may decide it’s in everyone’s best interest to keep those money-losing hospitals open, propped up by money from more profitable urban hospitals, so we can’t definitely say these places are going to close. In fact, the chains have already been doing this. On the other hand, we shouldn’t be blind to the prospect that rural hospitals do sometimes close. The Lee hospital has already closed once before and is now back after years of work. The hospital in Patrick County closed and has yet to be reopened. The threat to rural hospitals seems very real. If the finances of these money-losing hospitals change even more for the worse, how much more can the chains that operate them withstand? Everybody has their limits.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that some or even all of these hospitals were to close. That would be an example of the changes to Medicaid having an impact on the general population, which would touch a lot more voters than simply some people losing Medicaid. Now, to the politics: Five of these six are in Republican districts — Southern Virginia in Emporia is the exception. Southampton Memorial in Franklin is in Kiggans’ district, and we’ve already established that she’s vulnerable, regardless — so its closure, if that were to happen, could have an impact there.

Of the four others, one is in Wittman’s district, one in McGuire’s and two in Griffith’s. The political question is whether such a closure would reverberate so much around the district that it would move voters. One reason why it may not: Rural districts are big. Let’s say the hospital in South Hill closed. It’s in Mecklenburg, which constitutes just 3.9% of the district’s voters. Would its potential closure move voters in, say, Lynchburg, home to 9.59% of the district’s voters? Lee County constitutes an even smaller share of the 9^th District’s voters: 2.80%. Tazewell is larger: 5.04%. Even if every voter in those counties turned against Griffith in response, it wouldn’t matter. How much would any potential hospital closures in the coal counties matter elsewhere — keep in mind that 24.85% of the voters in that district are now east of the Blue Ridge. The spiritual heart of the 9th District may still be in coal country, but the voters aren’t.

We don’t really know how the politics here would play out, but these numbers suggest any negative impact might be limited unless people who aren’t affected are motivated to vote in ways they haven’t been before. And, once again, since the Medicaid changes don’t take effect until after the November 2026 midterms, the pressure on these hospitals likely won’t come until after that either. The bill’s authors have effectively insulated supporters from any immediate repercussions.

Energy prices

Here we come to a subject I’ve written about before. The basic facts: The nation (and Virginia, in particular) has growing demands for electric power, driven largely by the enormous power demands of data centers. About 90% of the new power being added to the grid is from renewables. The One Big Beautiful Bill eliminates tax credits for those projects. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, has declared that with the bill’s passage, “we have secured the termination of 90% of ‘Green New Scam’ projects.” He considers that a good thing. It’s hard to tell how much of the enthusiasm for doing away with those tax credits was fiscal philosophy (government shouldn’t favor one form of energy over another) and how much was actual antipathy toward renewables, either because they’re squeezing out fossil fuels or because people just don’t trust them. (At one conference I attended, I heard the former county attorney for one Republican county say his supervisors regarded renewables as “voodoo energy.”)

Either way, if Roy is right and 90% of future renewable projects don’t happen, we have a problem: As I’ve pointed out in a previous column, whether you like it or not, solar is the quickest form of energy to get up and running. A solar farm can become operational in as little as a year. Meanwhile, there’s a multiyear backlog on new gas turbines. S&P Global reports that the wait time for key parts for gas turbines is “upwards of five to seven years.” Let’s say you despise solar and think we should run the world on natural gas. The problem with that is by killing off solar now, while there’s this backlog on the key parts for gas plants, we create an energy gap where for some period of years we’re not adding much new power to the grid but our energy demands are still rising. The age-old lessons of supply and demand tell us that will lead to one thing: higher energy prices. Congress could have avoided that by giving a longer phase-out time to the solar tax credits, but it didn’t; many members of Congress can afford a philosophical vote without regard to the practical consequences.

Canary Media, which covers clean energy, says that without those tax credits, energy prices in Virginia will rise 8.3% by 2029. (Although I’ll point out that 2029 is several elections away, so the more immediate question is how much will prices rise by 2026? We don’t know yet.)

There’s another scenario, though, one that Roy wouldn’t like: Maybe the quick phase-out of those tax credits doesn’t kill renewables at all. Maybe developers keep building them, but that power is simply more expensive. The reason why this could happen is what I noted above: It takes less time to get solar up and running than anything else.

Under either scenario, it looks as if energy prices will rise in the short term, and this bill will be the reason why. Perhaps long term that’s not the case — maybe we “drill, baby, drill” and over time natural gas floods the grid and prices come down. However, my focus here is on the short term — as measured as the time between now and next year’s midterms. What changes in energy prices might we see between now and then? And, if they go up, who gets the blame?

In Virginia, Republicans have long been saying that the state’s Clean Economy Act is responsible for driving up prices by thwarting the development of anything other than wind and solar. That means we won’t have a clean-cut political argument between Democrats blaming Republicans for high energy prices and Republicans trying to defend that — we’ll have a political argument with both sides blaming the other for high energy prices. What will voters make of that? Maybe voters will be swayed one way or another, but there also seems a strong likelihood that the two arguments might cancel each other out. This could depend simply on which side has the better copywriters for campaign commercials.

Add all this up and my sense is Republicans may not pay a big political price for this bill. They might well lose their House majority next year, but they might have lost it anyway simply because of historical trends. This bill (if its negative impacts play out as predicted) could certainly help Democrats in swing districts such as the 2nd. But I have a hard time seeing how this puts Republicans in more secure districts at risk unless we see other changes in the political climate.

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