Six months ago, the Democrats blinked.
In March, the party’s leaders had the opportunity to shut down the government by blocking the passage of a cruel and punitive continuing resolution that provided billions for Donald Trump’s deportation machine while slashing funding for health care and homeless shelters. Worried about the politics of stymying an administration that was then in its intimacy—and of coming across as the “party of no” to voters unsure or skeptical of their priorities—Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and nine of his colleagues voted with Republicans to keep the government open.
It was a mistake that, thankfully, Schumer seems to have learned from. On Tuesday evening, he and his colleagues did not blink. The Trump administration wanted to keep the government open via a continuing resolution that as every bit as bad as the one in March, continuing to fund the most lawless and authoritarian government in American history. The Democrats refused to give it to him, triggering a shutdown. It’s a pivotal decision for the minority party—one that puts them on better footing to extract important concessions and highlight the administration’s most damaging policies.
The Democratic demands to keep the government open were straightforward and reasonable. They wanted to extend Affordable Care Act premium subsidies that will expire at the end of the year thanks to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which would prevent health care costs from skyrocketing for millions; to claw back Medicare funding that was cut in the OBBBA; and binding assurances that money that has been appropriated by Congress will be spent by an executive branch that has (possibly illegally) refused to do so in many cases.
The politics are much better for Democrats now than they were in the spring. In March, public opinion was split; that is not the case now. Several polls show that Republicans would take a much greater share of the blame if the government were to shut down now. That is hardly surprising for two reasons. The Republicans run the government and the Democrats are all but powerless, so it should hardly come as a shock that voters will blame the former for a shutdown. And Trump is very unpopular. The president is 11 points underwater, per a September New York Times/Siena poll that is consistent with others. Voters, in other words, don’t like what this administration is doing and support Democratic efforts to stymie it.
Republicans are responding as they typically do, with bellicose threats to unleash hell on anyone who dares oppose them. Office of Management and Budget chief Russ Vought has been particularly active, telling anyone within earshot that he has been studying shutdowns for years and that he plans to use this one to remake the government in his own hideous visage by cutting hundreds of thousands, if not millions of federal jobs. This is not an idle threat but there are reasons why Democrats shouldn’t heed it. For one, these kinds of sociopathic cuts would only make a shutdown worse for Republicans. For another, the Federal Unionists Network—an alliance of 35 public sector unions that represent federal workers—has backed the shutdown.
As is often the case, there is much to quibble with in the Democrats’ approach. For weeks a shutdown has seemed inevitable, but they have been hesitant to embrace it and their messaging has only come together over the last few days. The Democrats’ are emphasizing their reasonableness—they’re truly not asking for much!—and focusing on their strongest issue: health care. Nearly everything the party is saying about the shutdown involves health care. There are, obviously, other things going on, and this could have been an opportunity to talk about tariffs and the Trump administration’s growing authoritarianism.
Now that the government has shut down, there will be time to raise the salience of those issues and perhaps damage Trump. He may be unpopular but—as happened during his first term—his unpopularity has been relatively static. The same voters that hated him in the spring still don’t like him now. That is hardly cause for alarm for Democrats, who are still well positioned for the midterms. But given the larger stakes—an authoritarian president who is deploying troops against Americans and who is deporting law-abiding residents by the thousands—any dip in Trump’s popularity could prove pivotal.
There may very well be a lot of time for Trump’s popularity to dip. At this juncture, everything points to a long shutdown. There is a clear offramp—Democrats would likely fold in exchange for an extension of the ACA subsidies—but Trump has, for whatever reason, shown no interest in taking it. He and Vought may simply decide that the shutdown allows them to run the government however they like, without Congress’s approval, no matter what the courts say. (We can probably guess what the Supreme Court would say, unfortunately.)
That is getting ahead of things, however. This shutdown marks the first time that the Democratic Party has thrown itself against the Trump administration in any meaningful way. The Democrats are not whining about rule-breaking or norms. They’re shutting down the government to call attention to a president and a party that are engineering a massive scam to transfer wealth from the poorest people in the country to the richest. It won’t be an easy fight, but it’s a BFD that it’s happening at all.
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