Why Republicans are leaning in on healthcare: From the Politics Desk
Add to GoogleBreaking down what matters most to voters before the 2026 midterms03:48Get more newsonShareAdd NBC News to GoogleSept. 23, 2026, 5:00 PM EDTBy The Politics DeskWelcome to From the Politics Desk, a daily newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.
In today’s edition, Sahil Kapur explores why Republicans on the campaign trail are highlighting healthcare, an issue that has been a political weakness for them. Plus, Alexander Smith explains what President Donald Trump’s Greenland deal really accomplishes.
Healthcare is shaping up to be a vulnerability for the GOP in the midterm elections: According to this month’s NBC News poll, registered voters nationally trust Democrats over Republicans on healthcare by 22 points. And a New York Times-Siena College poll similarly found that likely voters preferred Democrats by 24 points on the issue.
Still, Republicans are leaning in on the issue, with many of them using populist rhetoric criticizing insurance and drug companies. The goal, according to GOP strategists, is more about trying to narrow the Democratic advantage than expecting to win on healthcare.
In battleground Michigan, Senate candidate Mike Rogers released an ad inveighing against high prescription drug costs relative to Canada as he runs against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who backs “Medicare for All.”
In a New Jersey swing district, Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr. is running an ad lamenting that too many families “suffer because of big insurance companies.” And even in deep red Kansas, Republican Sen. Roger Marshall has an ad that credits him for “standing up to big insurance.”
“Republicans need to make up a deficit with women voters, and when you ask women what they are most focused on, healthcare always scores very high,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who co-conducts the NBC News poll with Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt. He added: “You don’t have to win an issue. You just have to compete on the issue.”
But Democrats are blasting the $1 trillion in Medicaid spending cuts that Republicans passed on party lines in the “big, beautiful bill,” as well as a pot of Obamacare funding that Republicans successfully pushed to end last year.
According to NBC News polling, Democrats have consistently led on healthcare since the early 1990s. Their edge topped 30 points in 2008, ahead of a blue wave, and it fell to as little as 7 points in 2010, a red-wave year.
And while Republicans spent much of the last decade, including President Donald Trump’s first term, attempting to repeal or undo the Affordable Care Act, the party has never coalesced around an alternative. The party has long favored curtailing healthcare funding to align with its support for tax cuts, a position that is coming into conflict with its growing reliance on working-class voters.
To hear President Donald Trump tell it, the deal he has sealed with Greenland and Denmark is “a dream come true” for the United States, allowing it to build more military bases on the vast Arctic island while restricting investment there by Russia and China.
The security pact falls short of Trump’s past expansionist demands, reaffirming Danish sovereignty over a land he previously said must become a U.S. territory, and respecting Greenlanders’ right to determine their own future.
Despite that, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the deal “gives the United States permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland, completely addressing ALL of our many U.S. concerns.”
It’s the culmination of a yearslong fixation for Trump and a more recent push for control of the semiautonomous Danish territory, with his threats to use force if necessary alarming European allies and giving ammunition to the Kremlin as it continually tests Western cohesion and mettle.
While Denmark and Greenland have been eager to present the deal as a win for all sides, analysts have doubts about how much it actually improves on decades-old defense agreements — and how much was achieved through threats that couldn’t have been worked out through a more amicable diplomacy.
“This was a phenomenal amount of work to get to where we were already,” said William Alberque, a former NATO official who is now based in Berlin. “They just wanted to wave something in front of Trump and say, ‘You got more.’”
