Rove Warns GOP: Without a Health Care Plan, 2026 Could Be a Disaster
Republican strategist Karl Rove is urging his party to prepare a concrete and convincing pitch to voters well before the next midterm cycle, cautioning that the absence of a real health care proposal could severely damage their prospects.
Speaking on Fox News’s “Journal Editorial Report,” Rove said the GOP cannot enter the 2026 races empty-handed on core domestic issues. He argued that candidates must be able to explain both their economic vision and their approach to health care in a way that resonates beyond party loyalists. “If the Republicans want to maximize their victories in 2026, they need to go back in the way-back machine to 1992 and remember the immortal words of that great strategist, James Carville. ‘It’s the economy stupid,’ he said,” Rove noted. “And you got to have an agenda that is forward-looking.”
Rove said Republicans should frame their plans around policies that encourage economic expansion and help families improve their financial well-being. As he put it, candidates must be thinking in terms of “progrowth policies” that ordinary voters can immediately understand and feel.
He stressed that health care cannot be sidelined. “And ‘don’t forget health care,’ Carville famously said,” Rove reminded viewers. “The Republicans have got to have a health care agenda, otherwise they’re going to be in deep trouble.”
The topic has already proven volatile. The recent government shutdown — the longest in the nation’s history — hinged in large part on demands from Democrats to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies before permitting the government to reopen. Those enhanced subsidies expire at the end of the year, a development expected to push premiums higher for millions. That expiration is also creating uncertainty inside the GOP, since many Republican voters rely on those subsidies and are now bracing for steep costs.
Rove said these pressures are exposing division within the Republican ranks. In his view, lawmakers are increasingly worried about the political fallout tied to the public’s economic frustrations, while the benefits of the administration’s major tax and spending legislation have not yet been felt widely enough. He described the anxiety this way: members are “scared to death of the midterm election,” because the public isn’t feeling the results of President Trump’s major legislative achievement.
Rove pointed directly to the gap between Trump’s expectations and voter perceptions. “If the president’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ was as instantaneously positive as he thinks, his approval numbers on the economy wouldn’t be in the 30s, and his overall approval wouldn’t be in the low 40s,” he said.
He concluded that Republicans cannot afford to enter the cycle without a clear roadmap. “So Republicans are concerned, and they need to have an agenda going into the 2026 midterms, and they don’t have a forward-looking agenda at this moment,” he said.
{Matzav.com}
