“To the extent that there’s a lot of noise in the political landscape about other issues — I mean, when you go out and knock doors, like, nobody’s talking to you at the doors about the SAVE Act, for instance,” Seidel said.
That message clashes with the arguments from some of the biggest proponents of the SAVE Act. Activist Scott Presler, for instance, has argued directly to Republican lawmakers that they need to pass the SAVE America Act in order to show a demoralized Republican base that the party is fighting for them — and that running on only “milquetoast tax cuts” would lead to defeat in November.
But Seidel said the kind of voters more motivated to come out over the voting bill are just “a small vocal faction.”
Nathan Nascimento, AFP Action executive director, said normally reliable GOP voters are frustrated with economic issues.
“They don’t feel like their voice is being heard. They’re really concerned about the cost of living, but they don’t know if that even matters,” Nascimento said. “We have to give them a reason to show up … They need to be motivated in order to turn out to vote.”
Seidel said solutions to bring costs down, rather than political red meat like the SAVE America Act, are what candidates need to hammer home to voters.
The super PAC with connections to the billionaire Charles Koch first sounded the alarm about the need for a plan to drive down costs in an “interested parties” memo back in April, warning that the Senate Republican majority is at risk. The Americans for Prosperity partner advocacy organization has also released a legislative playbook that includes permitting reform, subsidizing health savings accounts and some of the housing supply reforms that Congress recently enacted.
Those concerns have only been amplified, according to AFP Action, as its network of activists focusing on Senate races knocked on its one millionth door of the cycle last month.
If Republicans lean into solutions for affordability problems, they can stave off a Democratic wave in these midterms, Seidel said. And there’s still time for voters to be persuaded.
“The way that voters are looking at it, they’re willing to give a candidate the benefit of the doubt that they can solve it in the future if they have ideas and solutions and they are competent,” Seidel said.
As always with a midterm election, turnout is expected to be lower than in a presidential year. Nascimento said the view from the field is that voters are prepared to ride or die on a candidate’s economic promise, as they did in 2024.
“They want to know that the candidate can actually deliver on it. And if they’re able to make that case and actually show what their plan is, voters are going to be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt,” Nascimento said.
AFP Action has put millions of dollars behind boosting messaging to voters on the “One Big Beautiful Bill” of Trump’s tax cuts and spending cuts, or “Working Families Tax Cuts,” as Republicans have rebranded it. But it is complicated to message to voters, particularly since the tax benefits — those assessed as “milquetoast” by SAVE America Act advocate Presler — mainly maintained the status quo.
“The components of the bill are really, really strong,” Nascimento argued. “The more that people kind of point to those specific components, the stronger the support becomes for the entirety of the package.”
Above all else, it’s difficult for Republicans to push that affordability message when Trump himself is taking the wind out of Republicans’ sails on what they would otherwise tout as wins on the affordability front. Trump declined to sign a major bipartisan housing bill in protest of the Senate’s inaction on the SAVE America Act, and called the housing bill “a yawn” and “so unimportant.” (More on that from our colleague Julia Manchester, who was also in our conversation, here.)
“The Democrats are doing a very good job of having sort of a unified party message on the issue,” Seidel said. “The only thing that’s going to break through is if it’s an individualized message at the candidate level, and so that’s really just what needs to happen.”
In other words: Don’t count on President Trump coming to the rescue on affordability, Senate Republican candidates.
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