Polls have shown that a majority of Americans disapprove of the Republican tax plan; they believe it is skewed toward the wealthy and that they are more likely to owe more to the federal government rather than less. Rather than disputing those findings, however, GOP lawmakers gave credit to the opposition. “The polls are down because there’s a disinformation and fear-mongering scheme going on by the Left,” Representative Tom MacArthur of New Jersey told me shortly before the vote.

MacArthur is one of those Republicans whose vote on Tuesday could come back to haunt him next year if the perception of the bill doesn’t turn around. He represents a competitive district in a state that will bear the brunt of the tax bill’s limits on the state-and-local deduction. After criticizing an earlier version of the GOP proposal that killed the popular provision entirely, MacArthur helped negotiate a compromise and is now an ardent defender of the policy.

Republicans like him are betting that Democrats have had too much success in trashing the tax bill—that far from being angry, their constituents will be, as MacArthur put it, “pleasantly surprised” when their taxes actually go down next year. And they may be right. Democrats have seized on expiring provisions in the GOP bill to argue that over the course of a decade, it represents a tax increase on millions of middle-class families. But in the short term, analyses show, the vast majority of people will pay less than they do now. “They’re going too far, and the facts are going to catch up with them,” MacArthur told me. “People are going to see a tax cut, and all the fear-mongering in the world by Democrats is not going to change that.”

Republicans also took comfort in history, dredging up a Gallup poll from 1986 finding that just 18 percent of respondents believed the compromised brokered between President Ronald Reagan and Democratic congressional leaders would reduce their taxes. (A more recent and, for Republicans, a decidedly less helpful analogy would be Obamacare, which became popular seven years after its passage.)

Ryan told reporters he had “no concerns whatsoever” that the tax bill would be a political liability for his party. “Results are going to make this popular,” he declared.

The bill secured final passage on Wednesday after Republicans suffered an embarrassing hiccup on Tuesday afternoon. The plan was for the Senate to send the final bill to Trump’s desk on Tuesday night, but after the House vote, Democrats in the Senate announced that the chamber’s parliamentarian had ruled that a few provisions did not comply with Senate budget rules and could be struck from the bill. Because the Senate changed the bill, the House had to vote once again on Wednesday to send it to the president. That outcome, however, was merely a formality.