A Look At The Aftermath Of That "Big Beautiful Bill"
TRENDENCY
Was there ever any doubt that Congress would pass Trump’s BBB? Sure, some hardline conservatives made some public noise about President Donald Trump’s budget/tax/spending bill that he labeled the Big Beautiful Bill (aka the BBB), but in the end, they almost all came home and voted yes. If you’ve followed congressional machinations long enough, the cynicism is hard to shake. What made this vote especially interesting (not from a policy perspective) is that by every measure, both Trump and congressional Republicans were forcing through a deeply unpopular bill, at least according to most public polling.
At Trendency, we have (of course) been tracking this measure as it moved through the House, Senate, back to the House, and then to President Trump’s desk for his signature. Let’s dive into the numbers to better understand how American voters view this massively important piece of legislation.
Overall Opinion
Starting with perhaps the least surprising results from our Trendency panel: this legislation is not popular. Overall approval averages are a full 25 points below disapproval and only one demographic group, Republicans, seems somewhat happy with the content of the bill.
A quick reminder that, as with many questions on our Trendency platform, users can respond with nuance. We give respondents 100 points, with which they are allowed to allocate their approval or disapproval. We like these questions over a Likert scale or similar method, as it allows for users to adjust their answers with a subtlety that “approve” or “disapprove” doesn’t provide.
Interpreting the table above is slightly different from traditional polling. On Trendency, the average allocated disapproval for the BBB sits at 55. That doesn’t mean that 55% of respondents disapprove of the bill, but instead means that, on average, voters allocated 55 points of their 100 to disapprove. We like to argue that this allocation procedure allows for the comparison of the relative strength of each position or opinion. So Republican support for BBB sits at an average of 59, while average opposition is 23. Quite a mixed opinion, especially when compared to Democrats’ strident disapproval.
Opinion Over Time
While there were some changes made to the margins of the BBB as it wound through Congress, the overall framework of the bill remained consistent enough for Trendency to track approval over time. As shown in the trendlines below, registered voters were not super pleased with the legislation back in May and this disapproval only increased during and after its final passage.
In the case of the overall opinion of the BBB, average approval levels never moved from the 30-point mark. The only apparent movement from late May until today is a shift from “not sure” allocation to disapproval. Does this mean that voters grew to like the bill less as they learned more about it? Well, as always, the story is a little more complicated.
Familiarity with the BBB
Not everyone keeps up with politics on a day-to-day basis (in fact, most do not). People lead busy lives, or can understandably get turned off by our political environment. Hence, we like to ask our panelists to rate their familiarity with big-ticket items such as this particular piece of legislation. This time, Americans were asked to rate their perceived knowledge on a scale from 0-100. For purposes of this research, we have grouped responses into two groups: those who are more familiar with the BBB and those who are less so.
When we look at these two groups and their subsequent opinion of the BBB, a striking difference appears. Those who rate themselves as more familiar with the bill are much more likely to approve of it than those who are paying less attention. (We should note, of course, that the BBB is nonetheless underwater with this news-following group and they are more likely to disapprove than approve of it.)
This table seems to tell a different story about support for the bill than the trendline did. Those who pay more attention to it are more in favor compared to those who are unfamiliar with the bill. How does that square with our previous reading of movement from “not sure” to “disapprove?” To answer that question, we need to dive into the composition of these familiarity groups a little more.
The above bar chart shows the demographic breakdown for our respondents on the BBB familiarity question and compares the filtered groups of “familiar” and “unfamiliar.” There are large gender differences, but taking a look back at the first chart in this newsletter suggests that opinions of the legislation did not differ too greatly by gender. It did by party, but differences by party on familiarity aren’t huge.
Rather, our analysis points to age and begins to complete the picture. Younger voters are much less likely to show approval for the BBB. Meanwhile, the older you get, the higher your average support.
Conclusion
So, yes, the more knowledge voters have about Trump’s legislation, the higher the support levels, but it really comes down to who is familiar with it. The “familiar” subset is made up of older voters and their slightly more amenable views on the BBB.
What can we conclude from this exercise? Despite our deep dive into support levels, none of these groups (save the Republican base) actually like this bill. Does dislike for the BBB stop it from being passed by Congress, harming our nation, and greatly impacting our future? Not really. But it does place the crosshairs on the incumbent Republican legislators who pushed this through. This has all the trappings of something that is not going away from the public psyche anytime soon, and something that might soon come to haunt Republican candidates in Virginia this fall and even the mid-terms in 2026 on a national scale.
Big pieces of legislation are rarely popular from the beginning (see Obamacare), but often become more popular as the effects improve people’s lives. This bill is starting at an incredibly low popularity level, and it is questionable whether there is much in the bill that will have a noticeable positive impact on the majority of the American people. While the saying usually goes, “there’s nowhere to go but up,” only time will tell how the BBB will both impact and be viewed by the American people.
