The votes by a handful of Democratic senators this week to end a government shutdown without key concessions from Republicans have left the party bruised and divided, struggling to explain to a furious base why they folded without securing the health care subsidies they called essential. For many this was a head-scratching defeat, just days after election triumphs showed voters were on their side.
The votes by a handful of Democratic senators this week to end a government shutdown without key concessions from Republicans have left the party bruised and divided, struggling to explain to a furious base why they folded without securing the health care subsidies they called essential. For many this was a head-scratching defeat, just days after election triumphs showed voters were on their side.
But the closing chapter to the more than 40-day standoff, and the underlying fight over extending tax credits under the Affordable Care Act, could prove perilous for Republicans in the long term. President Donald Trump’s own pollsters and allies have warned that not extending the health care subsidies would amount to a major political risk in the midterms, and the public has shown it will blame a shutdown on the party in power — making any future breakdowns risky for Republicans.
The result: The longest government shutdown in U.S. history has no clear ultimate political victor as the House prepares to vote Wednesday on the deal to reopen. Polling shows the public disapproves of both parties’ approach. Democrats are bearing the brunt of the political losses in the immediate term, while Republicans are bracing for longer-term consequences.
Trump took a victory lap on Fox News, saying Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) “thought he could break the Republicans, and the Republicans broke him.” Democrats, he boasted, are “not getting much.”
Schumer said Republicans now “own” the health care fallout.
“They knew it was coming,” said Schumer, who opposed the deal but is facing intense criticism from his base for the outcome. “We wanted to fix it. Republicans said no, and now it’s on them.”
Most polls have found more Americans blaming Trump and Republicans for the shutdown than Democrats, though that margin decreased over time. A Washington Post poll on the first day of the shutdown found 47 percent of the public blaming Trump and Republicans in Congress more for the shutdown, while 30 percent blamed Democrats; by late October, the margin was 45 percent to 33 percent.
An Economist-YouGov poll over the past week found blame nearly even at 34 percent for Democrats and 36 percent for Republicans, with 24 percent blaming both equally. The same poll found Americans disapproving of how congressional Democrats were handling the shutdown by a 20-point margin, Trump by a 22-point margin and congressional Republicans by a 25-point margin.
Democrats had hoped the shutdown would showcase their resolve to push back on Trump, months after their concessions in another fight over government funding infuriated much of the party. They wanted to avoid a repeat of this March, when Schumer and other Democrats drew blowback for joining Republicans to pass a funding bill and avert a shutdown.
For more than five weeks this fall, Democrats took a harder line in negotiations, saying they would not give up their leverage and reopen the government unless Republicans gave them significant victories — most of all, a deal to extend the pandemic-era ACA tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the year. Millions of Americans are set to see their health insurance payments double or triple in 2026 as prices rise and pandemic-era subsidies end.
The bill to reopen the government, which passed the Senate on Monday and now heads to the House, would reverse more than 4,000 federal layoffs attempted during the shutdown and prevent future layoffs through Jan. 30, a win for Democrats. On the issue of extending ACA subsidies, however, Senate Republicans agreed only to hold a vote by mid-December. House Republicans have not made the same promise, and it’s not clear the measure could pass the Senate.
Democratic lawmakers across the ideological spectrum rejected this week’s deal as insufficient, a sign of how much public pressure they felt to deliver more results. The seven Democratic senators and one Democratic-leaning independent who voted to end the shutdown are more insulated from political blowback than many of their colleagues: A couple are set to retire, while others are not on the ballot in 2026. They said the shutdown was becoming too painful and that the vote later on ACA subsidies will put Republicans on the spot on health care.
Schumer and the Democratic leader in the House, Hakeem Jeffries (New York), both opposed the deal, as did Democrats’ most vulnerable incumbent senator seeking reelection next fall: Jon Ossoff of Georgia.
“The core issue for Democrats is health care,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California), who opposed the deal and says he wants Schumer replaced as Democratic leader over the result. “If you’re not going to fight to stop premiums from hiking for millions of Americans, then how are you going to fight for our basic values?”
Republicans say they want to scale back spending now that the coronavirus pandemic is over and have long opposed the Affordable Care Act, the signature policy of President Barack Obama. But some in the GOP are nervous about letting costs rise ahead of the midterms. GOP pollsters have cautioned for months that ACA subsidies are popular.
A July memo co-written by Tony Fabrizio, a top adviser to Trump’s campaign last year, warned that Republican candidates for Congress might suffer if the party lets the tax credits expire and noted that — unlike controversial Medicaid changes in Trump’s signature legislation that take effect after the midterms — the ACA fallout would kick in soon.
A KFF poll released last week found 74 percent of Americans supported extending tax credits, and among those who did, 3 in 4 said either Trump or congressional Republicans would deserve most of the blame if Congress does not extend them.
Roughly a dozen House Republicans in swing districts have said they would support an extension of the ACA tax credits, some pitching bipartisan proposals that would extend it for as long as two years. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), a staunch Trump ally for years who more recently has clashed with his White House, has said she is getting phone calls from people who will not be able to afford health insurance if the ACA tax credits expire and has criticized GOP leadership for not addressing the looming price hikes.
“Democrats shoved Obamacare down our throats, but Republicans have done NOTHING to fix the disaster it created,” she vented recently on social media.
Patrick Sebastian, a Republican strategist in battleground North Carolina, said Democrats “got nothing” from dragging out the shutdown but acknowledged that a sudden cutoff to ACA subsidies would pose a political challenge. He predicted Republicans will do their best to “work on a soft landing for health care.”
“Once you give someone something and you take it away a hundred percent, it’s politically difficult,” he said.
Christina Gray, 58, an independent voter from Texas who gets her health insurance through the ACA, said the shutdown fight, for her, boils down to Republican opposition to the health care law. “The Democrats, I do have to give them this, they’re trying to help somebody,” said Gray, who has not voted in recent years. “And the Republicans, they’re just being ridiculous.”
Even some Democrats opposed to this week’s funding deal say they think they have prevailed in the minds of voters. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) said Democrats “pounded a message into the public sphere so successfully that it has really become the dominant message right now and a huge vulnerability for Republicans.”
“We’re disappointed about the outcome, but that’s not to suggest there wasn’t some significant benefit to it,” said Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vermont).
White House aides who have been watching the president’s decline in polling as the shutdown has dragged on — and as Republicans faced a drubbing in this month’s off-year elections in several states — are projecting confidence that the shutdown won’t hurt Trump long-term. They’ve suggested that recent dips in the president’s approval rating are merely blips and emphasized a focus on driving down consumer prices, which have emerged as a political liability. The officials, like some others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy more candidly.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Staff members with the White House’s Office of Legislative Affairs made the rounds to GOP offices this week to express their support for the shutdown-ending proposal and ensure that the party was aligned in passing it, according to a Republican congressional aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. The White House staffers made clear that they had signed off on language to roll back federal layoffs, the only provision that gave congressional Republicans pause, the aide said.
On at least one check-in call, the aide said, White House staffers did not mention ACA credits.
Marianna Sotomayor, Kadia Goba, Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Matthew Choi and Scott Clement contributed to this report.
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