With their One Big Beautiful Bill Act facing some ugly polling data, Speaker Mike Johnson and Republicans on Capitol Hill are borrowing a page from President Biden’s playbook and trying to rebrand their signature legislative item of the year as a “working families tax cut” instead of dwelling on the entitlement rollbacks and immigration enforcement provisions of the plan that have so far proven relatively unpopular. 

The GOP has been trying out its new messaging in recent days, and on his first full day back at the Capitol for work, Mr. Johnson welcomed small-business owners from Virginia to tout the tax cuts in the Big Beautiful Bill signed by President Trump in July. GOP lawmakers trying to sell the bill to their constituents during the summer recess did not fare well, according to many reports from the field.

A gold-star poll from the Pew Research Center, released in August, suggested that voters view the bill negatively by a large margin. The survey shows that 46 percent of Americans have a negative opinion of the legislation, while 32 percent hold a positive view. 

The percentage of people who view the law in an extremely negative way is also three times the proportion of those who view it extremely positively. Just 11 percent of respondents told Pew they “strongly approve” of the tax and spending law, while 33 percent “strongly disapprove.”

In addition to hundreds of billions of dollars for new defense and border security spending as well as new restrictions for Medicaid and food stamp recipients, the Big Beautiful Bill introduced new provisions to reduce taxes on tips and overtime for some taxpayers, made many tax cuts passed during the first Trump administration permanent, and introduced new tax deductions for older Americans and people buying new American-made vehicles. 

On Wednesday, the speaker argued that the new messaging is not a “rebranding,” but rather an attempt to highlight some of the more positive aspects of the bill.

“It’s not a rebranding, and what we have to do to sell it is tell the truth,” the speaker told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday morning. “I’m not surprised that some of the early polling was less than favorable in some areas of the country because there has been a full-on strategy by, frankly, the mainstream media and the Democrats of course, to try and misrepresent what’s in the bill.”

“If you look at the polls of all the individual provisions of the bill, they’re wildly popular,” Mr. Johnson said. 

He confirmed that the messaging guidance came out of a collaborative effort between House leadership, the White House’s political team, and the National Republican Congressional Committee, an outside group charged with electing Republicans to Congress. That group is led by Congressman Richard Hudson. 

“We have a strategy that we’re working on. Richard Hudson … is doing an extraordinary job,” Mr. Johnson said. “He and I are in partnership in this with all the leaders and all the members.”

“We’re closely coordinated with the White House and that’s the beauty of it, because the political team in the White House, the president himself — he and I spoke about this most recently last night at about 11:45 p.m. — about our strategy to win the midterms,” he added. 

The move is reminiscent of a similar one by the Democrats during the Biden years, when just before the 2022 midterm elections they passed the Inflation Reduction Act at a time when the core inflation rate was north of 6 percent, and a major concern for voters who were about to head to the polls. Rather than being focused on inflation, the act was primarily an effort to boost Mr. Biden’s climate and green energy policies, and had little to do with reducing inflation.

“What we encouraged everybody to do during the August district work period is go into their districts, do town halls, business roundtables, meet with everybody — constituents — and just take the time to explain what’s in it,” Mr. Johnson told reporters about Mr. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Wednesday.