President Donald Trump’s hacking away at food assistance benefits affects all Americans, obviously, including plenty who voted against him. Those people are genuine victims.
But what about the others?
“Michelle Flowers says it took eight months for her to get her food stamp benefits reinstated after they lapsed last year—and she only got it done, she said, because she was laid off from her job at a call center and finally had time,” reported the Washington Post. She didn’t vote in 2024 because she was “dissatisfied with her options.”
Then there’s Christine MacArthur, waiting in line at a church food bank after losing the $670 a month she had been receiving in SNAP benefits. “A longtime Trump supporter, she understands the philosophy behind the president and GOP lawmakers’ changes to SNAP,” the Post noted. Still, she admitted, “I don’t think they thought it through a hundred percent.”
There’s only one side of that exchange that didn’t think it through 100%, and it’s not the Republicans who have spent the last three decades making cuts to public assistance a centerpiece of their political identity.
We know voters don’t always make smart—or even particularly rational—decisions. But it still boggles the mind that people who literally depend on government assistance to survive would support the party that campaigns to shrink or eliminate those very programs.
Why? Because some trans kid competed in a swim meet? This is the puzzle Democrats have to solve.
It’s easy to blame politicians, the media, or misinformation. But millions of people are voting against their own material interests, often in ways that are entirely predictable. How do you persuade someone to prioritize the policies that determine whether they can put food on the table over the latest manufactured culture-war outrage?
One fascinating wrinkle is Arizona, where SNAP enrollment has fallen by over 50% as the state has moved more aggressively than most to implement the new federal requirements.
“Arizona has no choice but to meet these requirements,” Liliana Soto, press secretary for Democratic Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, told Reuters in an email. “If we don’t comply, we will be fined hundreds of millions of dollars and more vulnerable Arizonans will lose their food assistance.”
That may well be true. But it’s still striking that Arizona has moved faster than deep-red states like Oklahoma and Alabama, where Republican leaders have spent years celebrating cuts to the social safety net.
My theory is that the political pain will show up sooner in Arizona than elsewhere. Losing food assistance isn’t an abstract ideological debate. It’s immediate. It’s personal. And it has a way of clarifying which party is actually responsible.
If Democrats want to define Republicans, they couldn’t ask for a better opportunity than Republicans’ own policies, and Hobbs is happy to fuel the backlash.