Did Democrats Win the Shutdown After All?
On October 1st, in the hours after Senate Democrats forced a government shutdown, I argued that starting a fight seemed to be the point. Earlier in the year, Chuck Schumer, the Minority Leader, had rallied enough votes to keep the government open and faced a furious backlash from the Democratic base; capitulating again would have been politically intolerable. As the Times columnist Ezra Klein observed, a shutdown also presented the Democrats with an opportunity to focus public attention on President Donald Trump’s corruption, turning what had been a “diffuse crisis” into an “acute” one. In the end, the Democrats mostly oriented their demands toward health care—above all, the renewal of expiring Obamacare subsidies—as opposed to, say, prioritizing more abstract ultimatums related to creeping authoritarianism. (Klein suggested that the two could be linked.) The health-care dispute looked like typical grist for a shutdown, insofar as such events can be considered typical at all: before the current one, there had only been three of significant length. On those occasions, the party forcing the issue wilted under public pressure without getting what it came for, as the other side pointed to the intensifying costs for federal workers and average Americans.
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What happened next, this time, was strange, and not uniformly validating for the Democrats’ strategy. The shutdown became a big news story, of course, but didn’t concentrate attention to the degree one might have expected—in no small part because, in Trump’s Washington, there’s always something else going on. Not enough pressure mounted on the Democrats to give in, either. Republicans tried to make them take difficult votes to reopen the government, but those attempts never really cut through; as one G.O.P. strategist noted, the mainstream press lacked its past power to push a unified narrative that one side or the other appeared to be winning. To the extent that the press did do this, the answer was that it was good for Democrats: polls mostly showed them getting blamed less than Trump and other Republicans, whose ability, at least in principle, to drum up sympathy for federal workers was hamstrung by the Administration using the shutdown as a pretext to fire a bunch of them. Last week, Democrats swept the board in off-year elections across the country. Whatever role the shutdown played in those results, Trump put it center stage by declaring that the Republicans’ handling of it was a major reason for their bad night, then loudly urged his party’s majority in the Senate to nix the filibuster, a move that would have enabled them to reopen the government unilaterally. Democrats appeared to have all the momentum.
Then, on Sunday, eight moderate members of the Democratic caucus in the Senate voted with Republicans to move forward with a plan that would reopen the government, circumventing the filibuster; under the terms of the deal, agencies and programs will be funded through January (and in some cases beyond), laid-off federal workers will be reinstated, and the Obamacare subsidies will come up for a separate vote next month, but its success is far from guaranteed. Cue more furious backlash from the Democratic base. When I logged onto Bluesky this morning, I saw the eight Senators being referred to as “Cavers,” “Turncoats,” “Chickenshits,” and “Fuckers” (all in one post); as “QUISLINGS”; and as “Pathetic.” The last of those darts was fired (initially on X) by Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, who is a resistance darling of the moment after forcing through new, Democrat-friendly congressional maps in his state last week. Other Party bigwigs expressed disappointment, too, from the progressives Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to the milquetoast Democratic National Committee leader Ken Martin. A group of Democrats ended the shutdown “in return for—if we’re being honest—very little,” Klein wrote, in the Times. “If I were in the Senate, I wouldn’t vote for this compromise.”
The shutdown is not yet over: once the bill is through the Senate, it must pass the House—where Democratic leaders appear in no mood to compromise and the G.O.P. majority is slim—before Trump can sign off. But Senate Democrats’ resistance is over, and so this is an opportune moment to evaluate where the shutdown has left the Party. The impression that it contrived not only to snatch a snivelling defeat from the jaws of certain victory but to do so just as it had finally secured some electoral momentum is widespread, intuitive, and appealing—an exquisitely on-the-nose regression to the Party’s hapless recent mean. But I’m not sure that’s what happened here.
First, if the central Democratic goal was to be seen to be fighting back, then the Party already did that: over the weekend, the shutdown passed the forty-day mark, making it the longest in U.S. history. (The previous longest was thirty-five days, in Trump’s first term.) And, at least to some extent, I think Democrats did succeed on the merits, too: not only in focussing attention on health care as a pocketbook issue but in tying it to broader concerns about Trump’s unprecedented corruption, albeit in a more roundabout way than the direct rhetorical fusion that Klein initially proposed. Trump himself helped with this, by hauling down a wing of the White House to build an opulent ballroom and hosting a “Great Gatsby”-themed party at Mar-a-Lago while attempting to withhold food aid from millions of low-income Americans. As the election results filtered in last week, a narrative emerged, including a version among Republicans, that Trump had lost because he had become more fixated on the trappings of power than on high prices.
Presidents typically get a honeymoon period. Joe Biden’s seemed to end in August, 2021, when he was perceived as having botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trump’s appeared to last longer, at least in terms of élite consensus. I’ve thought a lot about why this was, and have concluded that the diffuseness of crises that he provoked had a lot to do with it—preventing the concentration of attention on one singular debacle. The shutdown alone did not cut through this dynamic. But it played heavily into the story of the recent elections, which did. The media is now asking whether Trump, finally, might be walking and quacking like a lame duck.
If Democrats’ goal was to guarantee Republican concessions on the health-care subsidies, then they would appear to have failed. Yet I’m not sure that Democrats holding out for longer would have got them much further. Trump did get the jitters, but responded, as The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait noted, not by caving on health care but by ranting about the filibuster, ultimately picking a different way of doubling down. (And, as Klein has pointed out, at least in a very cynical political sense, a deal on the subsidies might not have been advantageous for Democrats politically, if it saved Republicans from an acute electoral vulnerability during next year’s midterms.)
Both Chait and Klein argued this week that Democrats should nonetheless have fought on: Chait suggested that an internecine G.O.P. war over the filibuster would have intensified, possibly leading to its elimination (which Democrats ought to welcome, because the filibuster sucks); Klein wrote that the shutdown had only just succeeded in its goal of concentrating attention on Trump’s fecklessness, and that shutdown-induced chaos ruining people’s Thanksgiving trips would have underscored it. But I don’t think Senate Republicans would likely have scrapped the filibuster to end the impasse. (Their leader, John Thune, has at least been clear that the caucus wouldn’t have supported it.) And I don’t see why, at this point, the Democrats need this shutdown to continue marshalling attention—they have made sure that the health-care debate will continue outside that framework, and the Senate deal funds much of the government only through January, at which point Democrats could shutter it again. One could also make the case that by appearing to cave now, the Democrats have forfeited any credit they built for fighting in the first place. But pressing on with this particular fight forever wouldn’t have been costless: the shutdown has inflicted real harm on federal workers and SNAP recipients, among others. There are trade-offs, of course—rising Obamacare premiums will harm people, too.
Two of the Democratic standard-bearers to emerge from last week’s elections—Abigail Spanberger, the incoming governor of Virginia, and Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City—have emphasized different sides of these arguments in recent days. Before the eight Senators did their deal on Sunday, Spanberger had warned that, despite the Democrats’ good electoral showing, they did not have a mandate to continue the shutdown, and that Virginians, many of whom are federal workers, “want to see the government reopen”; Mamdani posted on X that a deal that raises health-care premiums “should be rejected, as should any politics willing to compromise on the basic needs of working people.” This, and the broader fury about the deal emanating from the base, has looked like a manifestation of what many observers have characterized as a conundrum for the Party: Does its future lie in moderation, or in uncompromising combativeness? Ultimately, I don’t see this as a conundrum so much as an opportunity. In September, I argued that Democrats needed to embrace what I saw as a pre-Trump strength of the G.O.P.—namely, an ability to build broad coalitions by cultivating a diffuseness of spirit and allowing politicians with different electorates to appeal to those differences. It’s at least worth considering the possibility that the end of the Democrats’ shutdown firewall, rather than reflecting a troubling lack of unity or disgraceful capitulation, is evidence of that spirit in action. Strictly speaking, the Democrats didn’t vote to end the shutdown. Two handfuls of them did. Many others were very angry about it. There’s a world in which both these positions—and their constituencies—can coexist.
The cost of such a spirit, as Republicans long ago learned, is occasional chaos, and headlines suggesting that your Party is in a “civil war.” Some politicians will fall down the resulting cracks: Schumer, for instance, refused to vote for the Senate deal, but was nonetheless accused of either tacitly sanctioning it or failing to stop it; even though he seemed to reverse course from his earlier vote to keep the government open, the satirical publication The Onion reposted a headline it had written back then: “Chuck Schumer Helps Pull Democrats Back from Brink of Courage.” But he might be as much a victim of his recent actions as an ossified reputation. On October 1st, I noted that, even if Democrats’ shutdown gambit were to succeed, it wouldn’t prove a panacea for its reputational malaise, and that the Party was in need of new leaders either way. Those leaders have now begun to emerge. ♦
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