On Halloween, I wrote the following: “I suspect maybe the Democrats will give in next week. They hope that outrage about the lack of food stamps and especially the exploding health care subsidies will force the Republicans’ hand, and they might be right about that. But more likely, once actual people start actually suffering, it’s the Democrats who will sue for peace, because Democrats actually give a couple of shits about that, whereas Republicans couldn’t care less, because not caring less is their brand.”
I’m not claiming any special insight here. Lots of people I was talking to at the time were thinking similar things. I even could have told you exactly which eight Senate Democrats (well, seven plus one independent) would cave, as they did on Sunday’s vote. For the record, just so you know: Catherine Cortez Masto, Dick Durbin, John Fetterman, Maggie Hassan, Tim Kaine, Angus King (the independent), Jacky Rosen, and Jeanne Shaheen.
Here’s their argument, in sum. (1) No Senate Republican was or is ever going to vote to extend the Obamacare subsidies, so getting a promised up-or-down vote next month is the best Democrats were going to get on that matter. (2) SNAP benefits will be back as a result of this resolution passing, so people won’t go hungry. (3) Likewise, air traffic controllers will return to work, and thousands of federal employees will be hired back. (4) If this dragged on long enough, Senate GOP leader John Thune just might have decided to give Donald Trump his way on the filibuster, doing away with it to pass a series of voter suppression laws that would rig our elections even more than they already are.
Those aren’t ridiculous arguments. But today, they don’t matter. What matters today to millions of loyal Democrats is that their party surrendered—again. And they’re sick and tired of watching them do this.
This was a very weird time to cave, for three reasons. First, the party is coming off a great election night less than a week ago. The leftist won, the centrists won, Democrats won in Georgia and Mississippi; there literally wasn’t a single bad result. Why kill that momentum cold? It’s really politically tone deaf.
Second, literally every poll I saw showed majorities blaming Trump and the Republicans, not the Democrats. That’s pretty amazing considering that by any objective reckoning, it was the Democrats who, in fact, did shut the government down. In addition to that, we have another set of polls, on Trump’s approval rating, where he is also tanking. A stadium full of football fans booed him at Sunday’s Washington Commanders game. As the pain grew, heading into the holidays—people going hungry, travel nightmares, all the rest—wouldn’t that public perception only metastasize? Why not let Trump drop to 35 percent approval, maybe 33? He wouldn’t care personally—by now, he just blindly asserts that his approvals are higher than they’ve ever been anyway. But he’d have dozens of Republicans coming to him predicting total disaster in the midterms, and he just might, under those circumstances, cut some kind of deal. He’s done it before.
Third, if you’re going to do something like this, you need to lay some groundwork so that people are emotionally prepared for it. It might have been different to do this just two weeks from now—on the eve of Thanksgiving, say. I think very few progressives would want the Democrats to keep the government shut down forever: Everyone who believes in the good work the federal government does wants it to function and do those things. So I think most progressives would have come around to that view. But this was sort of out of the blue. People weren’t ready for it emotionally.
Missing those three realities, not smelling them in the air, is bad leadership. Chuck Schumer voted “no” himself on the resolution, but there’s no one who thinks he didn’t give the eight his permission to go cast “yes” votes. Schumer has shown many times over the years: What he’s good at is guiding legislation through, as he did with those big bills while Joe Biden was president. For that kind of leadership, he has a knack. For running the opposition, though, he doesn’t have the right kind of insurgent instincts. And he really does come from another era. He came of political age during the Reagan years. Sometimes, a team just needs a new coach.
It’s worth giving some thought to how all this will look two or six or 10 months from now. If Obamacare premiums skyrocket and Republicans start to try to dismantle the ACA, either through legislation or administratively; if the economy continues to slide; if the Supreme Court rules against Trump’s tariffs; if ICE invades more cities, Trump’s approval will sink even lower and we could be primed for a Democratic rout next fall. Maybe all will be forgiven.
But that’s down the road. Right now, the main reality is the anger of the Democratic base. And by the way, and this is a very important point, it isn’t just young urban lefties raising the hue and cry against feckless Democratic leadership—it’s the kind of normie liberals who were out there in towns all across the country waving American flags on No Kings Day; the middle-aged and senior women who do 90 percent of the party’s legwork. They see a country being torn apart and ransacked by a group of thugs. They’re enraged, and they want fighters: an opposition party that communicates that they share and understand that rage. The Senate Democrats showed Sunday that they still don’t get that, and it’s not clear that some of them ever will.
