A protester holds signs denouncing President Donald Trump as people line up to attend a town hall meeting with Representative Mike Flood (Republican-Nebraska) in Lincoln, Nebraska, earlier this week. Many Republican members of Congress have stopped hosting town halls, saying they have been filled with Democrat activists. Photo / Terry A. Ratlzlaff, The New York Times
Representative Mike Flood, a Republican of Nebraska, was not even 30 seconds into his prepared introduction at a town hall in Lincoln when the booing and the jeering began. Then it didn’t let up for more than an hour.
“There’s been a lot of misinformation out there about the bill,” Flood told a crowd of more than 700 people gathered in a downtown recital hall, referring to United States President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy legislation that significantly cuts Medicaid, food benefits, and other programmes.
“You are a liar!” multiple people shouted back. “Liar! Liar!”
Flood, a second-term member of Congress who won his district last year by more than 20 points, soldiered through his slideshow presentation, saying, “We’re going to see an influx of money into Nebraska hospitals”.
“Liar!” the crowd responded, but louder this time.
“If we didn’t pass the big, beautiful bill,” Flood said, “there would have been a US$1600 tax increase to every Nebraska family.”
In response, the packed auditorium erupted in a chant of “Tax the rich”, and Flood finally had to pause his slides.
“The only way we’re going to get through tonight,” he said, “is if I get a chance to tell you how I voted.”
This was exactly the kind of reception many Republicans dreaded as they headed home to their districts for their six-week summer break.
Faced with selling a major piece of legislation that polls show is broadly unpopular and confronted with ruptures in Trump’s base over his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, they risk being met with angry questions for which they have no easy answers.
And town halls have proven to be a perfect outlet for a wave of energy from Democrats who see an opportunity to knock Republicans off balance more than a year ahead of the midterm elections.
The result has been a gradual disappearance of the open town hall as an exercise in democracy, with fewer elected officials willing to face the wrath of opponents in an era of supercharged polarisation.
For months, Republican lawmakers have stumbled in particular while trying to answer pointed questions from voters about unpopular cuts to Medicaid, the health insurance system increasingly relied on by working families as well as the poor.
“Well, we all are going to die,” Senator Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, told a crowd at a town hall in Butler, Iowa, in May, when someone in the audience yelled that the potential cuts meant that “people are going to die”.
Flood admitted to voters earlier this northern summer at a town hall that he had not read the entire bill before voting to pass it.
The August recess marks the first extended period of time that lawmakers have returned home since Trump signed the bill into law on July 4.
The line to get into Flood’s event on Monday afternoon local time, which was held in a more progressive city in his red district, snaked all the way around the block and looked from the outside like the size of one for a presidential campaign event.
The crowd, encompassing some supporters but by and large made up of critics, arrived heated, ready to express their fear and anger. Every answer from Flood seemed to turn it up a notch.
“How can you stand behind this bill that erodes the very services that people like me, my family and our families, younger vets coming home today, rely on?” John Keller, 76, a veteran, asked.
“Our veterans affairs are going to be better than they’ve been in a long time,” Flood responded.
“We do not have unlimited money in the US,” he said when asked why he voted for cuts to Snap, the food stamp programme, and healthcare research.
When pressed on Trump’s decision to fire the commissioner of the Bureau of Labour Statistics, Flood said he gave the President the benefit of the doubt.
“There’s always two sides to every story,” he said. “If all the person did was get the data out there, I would not have fired them. But I don’t know; things are complicated.”
When another attendee pointed out that tariffs were driving up the price of cars to the point at which they wiped out “any tax savings I will see from the bill which recently passed,” Flood simply repeated a Trump talking point.
“We need to be a country that makes things,” he said.
Flood bristled when one attendee called him a fascist. “Fascists don’t hold town halls with open question-and-answer sessions,” he said.
And when he was pressed on why he was “covering up the Epstein files”, he assured them he was for full transparency.
It did not seem that many in the crowd awarded him much credit for showing up.
“He’s coming here to be able to say that he’s listening, but he’s not,” said Jackson Hatcher, a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
“Everyone here who asked a question, he gave a canned response.”
Joyce Kubicek, a retired social worker, said she left unconvinced by his answers. “I don’t understand how he can say some of the things he’s saying; it seems false,” she said.
Earlier this year, Representative Richard Hudson of North Carolina, the chair of the House Republican campaign arm, discouraged members from holding in-person town halls such as this.
He said the sessions were being filled with Democratic activists, generated negative headlines and that a better way to communicate with voters was to hold telephone town halls where questions could be filtered by a moderator.
Many House Republicans have taken his advice. Of the 35 House Republicans who hold seats that Democrats are targeting in 2026, only one, Representative Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, has held an in-person town hall. (He, too, was booed and jeered.)
But the concerns over the bill and the economy appear to be so widespread that they cannot be screened out — even in the controlled environment of tele-town halls.
An attendee at a recent tele-town hall told Representative Ryan Mackenzie, a vulnerable Republican from Pennsylvania: “You and other Maga talk about monitoring and cutting welfare for poor people, but you don’t talk about the high tax breaks that overwhelmingly help the rich people”.
And Representative Eli Crane, a hard-right Republican from Arizona, was confronted by a constituent on a tele-town hall who said he was “concerned” that the bill added “significantly to the national debt” while cutting healthcare benefits.
In an interview on Tuesday, Representative Lisa McClain of Michigan, the No. 4 House Republican who oversees messaging for the conference, said she was weary of the topic of town halls.
“I don’t understand why everyone is fixated on the town hall piece,” she said, when there were other ways to connect with voters.
“Maybe it’s site visits; maybe it’s field hearings. Why aren’t people doing more op-eds?” she said.
“I don’t understand this fixation with town halls. You should do what’s best for your district. There’s 100 different ways to market.”
Trump, for his part, is not doing any marketing of his own bill. “It’s been received so well, I don’t think I have to,” he said on Meet the Press when asked why he was not doing events to promote his own agenda.
McClain, who plans to visit three manufacturing sites this month with vulnerable members in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, said she had not heard any concerns from lawmakers about how to take on tough questions from voters back home.
“What I really heard more than anything from members was, ‘Give me the data and the specifics as it pertains to my district,’” she said. “You really have to break it down into bite-size pieces that’s applicable for their districts.”
As they seek to turn around public opinion on the bill, Republicans are trying to focus on new data from the US Chamber of Commerce that found that voters favoured the tax provisions in the bill, even if they had a negative view of the agenda overall.
A memo from the National Republican Campaign Committee released last week encouraged members to focus on how the bill made the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent and cut taxes on tips.
In offering advice to members on how to get their message out to voters, it notably did not recommend holding in-person town halls.
Speaking to reporters after his event, Flood said he still believed that showing up was part of the job, even though the session ended with a chant of “Vote him out!”
“This doesn’t get better unless we show up in the town square,” he said. “If you feel strongly about what you’re doing in Congress, then stand in the town square, tell them why you voted that way.”
Flood said he had anticipated a rocky reception and admitted he was not satisfied with his answer on veteran benefits.
“I need to put my notes out,” he said. “I need to be very clear on why I think our veterans are being taken care of.”
Further engagement this year with his constituents, he suggested, may be online, in smaller groups or even on a tele-town hall.
“This is my third and final one for the year,” he said of in-person town halls. “We’re going to give you all a break.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Annie Karni
Photographs by: Terry A. Ratlzlaff
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