Brian Schatz didn’t think Republicans had thought this through. The Hawaii Democrat must have understood on some level why his GOP colleagues in the Senate were about to pass their massive tax giveaway to corporations and the uber-rich in the wee hours of Wednesday morning: President Donald Trump needed an eleventh-hour victory after a year of legislative failure, and Republican donors were explicitly threatening to halt financial contributions if lawmakers didn’t get something done. Still, hours before the vote, Schatz marveled at how the GOP could respond to major Democratic electoral victories over the past two months—a landslide in the Virginia gubernatorial election, and an upset for a Senate seat in Alabama—by passing an astoundingly unpopular bill that even neglects GOP-leaning voters in suburban swing districts.

“Suburbanites might make a decent amount of money, but they’re not hedge fund managers,” the senator told me Tuesday night at the Capitol Building. “They don’t have the amount of passive income that’s being rewarded in this bill. Middle-class folks who work for a living are not going to see the benefit of this. It is simply weird to me that they look at Virginia and they look at Alabama and they say, ‘Let’s harm suburbanites through the tax code.’”

If Schatz is right, the GOP is compounding an existing problem with suburban voters. Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that “from Texas to Illinois, Kansas to Kentucky, there are Republican districts filled with college-educated, affluent voters who appear to be abandoning their usually conservative leanings.” President Donald Trump repulses these voters, and some Democratic strategists are intent on winning them in 2018. On Wednesday, Talking Points Memo noted that the tax bill’s $10,000 limit on state and local income and property tax deductions will have a “particularly severe” impact on wealthy suburbs in states like New York, New Jersey and California, where Republican lawmakers already face tough re-election fights thanks to Trump.

The New Republic’s Jeet Heer raised important concerns about Democrats courting these voters—a strategy that notably failed for Hillary Clinton last year—yet a number of liberal lawmakers believe it could be fruitful if their party doesn’t abandon its base in the process. “I think we’ll get the suburbanites with this complete calamity of a tax bill,” said Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. Like Heer, these Democrats are committed to liberal policies—at minimum the party’s Better Deal agenda, and in some cases a more expansive populist vision. They aren’t advocating that Democrats move to the center to court Republicans. But they do buy the idea that suburban Republicans are newly available voters for Democrats, especially in the wake of this tax bill. The question is how to win those Republicans without betraying the party’s core principles.

“I hear from Republicans on a weekly basis who have given up on their party,” Congressman Jamie Raskin told me. The Maryland Democrat may have a skewed perspective, given that he represents a liberal enclave in the Washington metro area, but the Republicans in his district fit the profile of those whom Democrats think they pick up. “This is a tax bill that is not friendly to upper middle class Republican doctors and lawyers and corporate executives,” he said. “This is a bill that’s basically written for the very richest people in the country. You look at the estate tax. That’s going to benefit the richest two families out of a thousand. That’s the general tenor of the whole bill, and I think the public generally understands it’s going to benefit only the super wealthy and it is a giant dagger pointed at the heart of the American middle class.”