The conventional wisdom still seems to be that President Donald Trump and the Republicans have the upper hand in this shutdown fight. The numbers don’t support this view. We had the early Washington Post poll showing that people blamed the Republicans by 47-30 percent. Over the weekend, a CBS/YouGov poll dropped showing closer numbers, but with respondents still blaming the GOP by 39-30 percent. Trump isn’t popular; the Republican Party isn’t popular; doubling the healthcare premiums for millions of people isn’t very popular, either.
Still, I think I know why the conventional wisdom leans toward their side. It’s because everyone assumes the Democrats will cave—specifically, that four more Democratic senators will join the three who already voted with the Republicans and pass their bill. The Senate returns Monday night and starts voting, so we may see results here very soon.
That CBS poll, which has some absolutely brutal numbers for Trump (more on which later), also includes this little morsel. Respondents were given a list of words and asked which applied to each party. The main word they affixed to the Democrats? “Weak.” They’re right, of course. And if four more Democrats peel off and vote for the Senate Republican bill, they’ll just prove once again how lame they are.
If the Democrats stick together, they can win this and make Trump cave. It’s worth remembering that in the last shutdown, from 2018 into 2019, it was Trump who caved, and without getting what he wanted. He forced that shutdown over funding for his border wall. Thirty-four days after he started it, he ended it with no border wall funding. Granted, that was a different situation—a new Congress was sworn in in January 2019 with a Democratic House majority, so Trump knew there was zero chance of winning that fight.
But border-wall funding wasn’t the only reason Trump ran up the white flag. Military personnel weren’t being paid. Ditto air traffic controllers. Robert Reich, in an interview he did over the weekend, said that he thinks air traffic controllers are key here—as they were, to some extent, in 2018-19, when some of them started to call in sick after the first three weeks. Today, as then, they are working without pay. They guide the movement not only of commercial jets but of rich people’s private planes, and Reich posits that when Trump’s buddies start calling him and whining that they’re grounded, he’ll fold. I’ve definitely heard worse theories.
The Democrats have three cards to play here that give them a strong hand, if they’re willing to use it.
First, keep hammering away on healthcare premiums. It’s working. Granted, it’s a relatively small number of people on these healthcare exchanges—21.4 million. But they’re exactly the people the Democrats need to stand up for and show that they’re representing their interests. These are mostly poor and working class: Of the 21.4 million, according to Kaiser, 15.9 million, or about three-quarters of them, live on up to 250 percent of the federal poverty level (the FPL for a family of four is $32,150, and 250 percent of that is $80,375). Fighting for them while Trump and the Republicans are trying to jack up their premiums while preserving tax cuts for the rich is what the Democratic Party needs to be doing, not caving to seem “reasonable.”
Second, if Trump henchman Russ Vought starts laying off federal workers, as he has promised, that’s a huge political gift for Democrats. Granted, it’s a horrible real-world thing. So there is that to think about. But in the long term, the best way to protect the federal workforce from these maniacs is to win elections, and they’re not going to win elections by voting for cruel Republican bills.
Third comes the meta point. Voters don’t know policy, but they do have a pretty good nose for the essence of politicians and parties (hence the “weak” label above; incidentally, in that same poll, the main word respondents associated with Republicans was “extreme”). And they surely know by now, after watching this horror show for eight months, that Trump sows chaos. Well, a long shutdown is the definition of chaos. If Democrats just say over and over and over again that “this chaos is brought to you by Donald Trump, who creates chaos everywhere he goes,” that should resonate.
So the Democrats can win this. Trump, as I noted above, is in trouble. That CBS poll has his approval at 42 and disapproval at 58, and he’s 10 points underwater on immigration, 20 under on the economy, and 30 under on inflation. He is failing, and he is flailing. There are more signs that tariffs are starting to have impact, and now, having destroyed the American soybean industry, he’s desperately trying to cobble together a $10 billion rescue plan for soybean farmers to make up for the pain his tariffs have visited upon them. (And where are you on this, Democrats? You should be talking about soybean farmers every day.)
True, the Democrats aren’t popular either. But they’re not popular because people don’t know what they stand for. Sticking together here will do a lot more to address that problem than giving Trump those four Senate votes, which will just show America one more time that Democrats always get rolled.
For God’s sakes, Democrats—shock us for once.
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