In March, I urged Democrats to shut down the government over possibly illegal budget cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency. Doing so would have allowed the Democrats to frame their argument as a response to Elon Musk’s unpopular chaos.
That shutdown did not happen. Now we’re onto the risk of — or an opportunity for another shutdown.
Most commentators from the left have urged some sort of shutdown fight. This time, Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, seems open to their encouragement and said recently that Democrats had settled on restoring health care funding from the big Republican domestic bill as their line in the sand.
I’m less sure about the wisdom of a shutdown this time. But since it seems like a real possibility, I believe that Mr. Schumer is picking the wrong fight, or at least the wrong issue to hinge his fight on. Instead of health care, I’d focus on the one issue that has had the most impact in denting Mr. Trump’s approval rating: tariffs.
I’m heedful of the argument that strategic shutdowns usually fail to produce lasting benefits for the opposition party. And the lasting benefits are what matter here: Every additional seat the Democrats gain in the midterms will do more to restrain Mr. Trump than anything congressional Democrats do this month.
But the arguments and goals for a shutdown this time from writers on the left have been all over the place — and somewhat mutually incompatible.
The approach I originally would have urged was best articulated by Bill Scher of Washington Monthly: Instead of Democrats asking for something specific, they’d refuse, on principle, to provide votes for a party they saw as acting in bad faith and acquiescing to abuses of power by the executive branch.
This plan is consistent with the argument that providing votes to allow for the passage of a continuing resolution is a tacit endorsement that we’re still operating in “normal” times, a message Democrats would like to avoid. And it provides for more tactical flexibility.
It also avoids the potential pitfall of focusing demands on health care, which resembles the typical negotiation tactics from budget fights past. Precisely because Medicaid and Obamacare are popular programs, Democrats might be making Republicans an offer that is too good to refuse: a compromise on health care could be attractive to swing-seat Republicans and remove an issue against them ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Implicitly, under Mr. Scher’s plan, Democrats would be daring Republicans to blow up what’s left of the legislative filibuster, clarifying that the nation is under one-party rule.
I don’t think there’s necessarily anything for Democrats to fear from this. If Democrats win back power in 2028, they’ll have extremely narrow majorities themselves, surely an uncooperative opposition party and four years of Trump executive orders and Republican legislation to undo. And the filibuster is already on its last legs; earlier this month, Senate Republicans changed the rules to make confirming Mr. Trump’s nominees easier.
But two things gave me pause. One is that the message — actually, we’re not negotiating, we’re refusing to negotiate; you have your majorities and all of this is your problem — would require a lot of discipline in practice, and Democrats aren’t very good at that.
The other reason is that the crisis atmosphere that Democrats are treating as a desirable feature of the shutdown might be exactly what Mr. Trump wants, particularly after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
I would condition any votes to keep the government open on the passage of the Trade Review Act, which already has bipartisan sponsors in both chambers of Congress. If Congress eventually passed the Trade Review Act but Mr. Trump vetoed it, Democrats could then reassess where public opinion stood.
Why tariffs and not health care? For one thing, Mr. Trump’s tariffs make clear that what’s happening in Washington today is not normal. Not only are these the highest tariffs in almost 100 years, but Mr. Trump has repeatedly been usurping Congress’s constitutional power to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises” and “regulate commerce with foreign nations” to the point where his tariffs will soon be under review by the Supreme Court.
Moreover, tariffs are one of the few things that have actually moved Mr. Trump’s numbers. In April, after his “Liberation Day” tariff announcement, his net approval rating plunged in the Silver Bulletin approval tracker to –9.7, from –3. Immigration controversies, Jeffrey Epstein and everything else have not meaningfully sunk Mr. Trump’s approval ratings quite like tariffs.
Our averages also find that Mr. Trump has a –31.6 net approval rating on inflation, and a–17.3 on trade, far worse than his overall numbers. The polarity of public opinion on the economy has flipped from Mr. Trump’s first term. Now the culture wars are keeping him afloat, while voters grow increasingly concerned about the direction of the economy. (By contrast, Mr. Trump’s approval rating on immigration is only a –4.5.)
Tariffs could also drive a greater wedge between Mr. Trump and the congressional Republicans. And such a fight could give Democrats another chance to focus on recent inflation and jobs data, which suggest that the labor market has slowed significantly.
To be fair to Mr. Schumer, given the choice between a shutdown fight over health care and nothing, I’d take the shutdown over health care. I think catering to the Democratic base is usually overrated — the whole point of the base is that it’s loyal to you. But Democrats have benefited from greater enthusiasm in recent special elections, and that will probably carry over to some degree into the midterms. Conceding on the budget battle would be out of step with a large majority of Democratic voters, who want to see more fight from their party.
Still, it’s not clear what the endgame is. Is Mr. Schumer rooting for concessions that would actually be popular with swing voters? And if he doesn’t get them, what’s the plan? The strategy might be better than nothing, but it still indicates that the Democrats are hobbled by caution — tariffs would be the bolder play.
Nate Silver, the founder and former editor of FiveThirtyEight and the author of “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,” writes the newsletter Silver Bulletin.
Source photographs by Thanasis and SchulteProductions/Getty Images.
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