Politics Isn’t Just a Game
There are real life consequences.
Regular readers will have gathered that Steven and I are regular listeners to and fans of the Ezra Klein Show podcast. I’ve said many times that he’s one of the best interviewers in the politics space. He’s a bright and thoughtful guy who seems genuinely interested in understanding the world around him.
But today’s column, “What Were Democrats Thinking?” shows he’s as susceptible as anyone to wishful thinking.
Back in September, when I was reporting an article on whether Democrats should shut down the government, I kept hearing the same warning from veterans of past shutdown fights: The president controls the bully pulpit. He controls, to some degree, which parts of the government stay open and which parts close. It is very, very hard for the opposition party to win a shutdown.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that Democrats were winning this one. Polls showed that most voters blamed Republicans, not Democrats, for the current shutdown — perhaps because President Trump was bulldozing the East Wing of the White House rather than negotiating to reopen the government. Trump’s approval rating has been falling — in CNN’s tracking poll, it dipped into the 30s for the first time since he took office again. And last week, Democrats wrecked Republicans in the elections and Trump blamed his party’s losses in part on the shutdown. Democrats were riding higher than they have been in months.
But, of course, these are two wildly different notions of “winning.” Making President Trump and the Republicans look bad is not the same as getting them to capitulate in a policy standoff. So long as they can keep their caucus united in the House, Democrats have zero ability to pass legislation there. As the minority party in the Senate, they can—and did, for 40 days—refuse to give consent to a continuing resolution but they can’t control what legislation the majority puts up for a vote. Even if we concede that a drubbing in a handful of off-off-elections are a meaningful indicator, the next elections are a year away and, sadly, Congressional Republicans care far, far more about their primary voters than they do the mythical median voter.
After noting that the defecting Democrats who broke the filibuster go essentially nothing for doing so, Klein continues:
To understand why the shutdown ended with such a whimper, you need to understand the strange role the A.C.A. subsidies played in it. Democrats said the shutdown was about the subsidies, but for most of them, it wasn’t. It was about Trump’s authoritarianism. It was about showing their base — and themselves — that they could fight back. It was about treating an abnormal political moment abnormally.
To the extent that it’s true that Democrats shut down the government, cynically using millions of military personnel and civil servants as pawns, to send a signal to their base that they are willing to fight, it seemed to work in the short run. Last Tuesday’s results were considerably better than predicted. But, of course, having caved so soon thereafter, they now look weak.
The A.C.A. subsidies emerged as the shutdown demand because they could keep the caucus sufficiently united. They put Democrats on the right side of public opinion — even self-identified MAGA voters wanted the subsidies extended — and held the quivering Senate coalition together. You shut the government down with the Democratic caucus you have, not with the Democratic caucus you want.
But the shutdown was built on a cracked foundation. There were Senate Democrats who didn’t want a shutdown at all. There were Senate Democrats who did want a shutdown but thought it strange to make their demand so narrow: Was winning on health care premiums really winning the right fight? Should Democrats really vote to fund a government turning toward authoritarianism as long as health insurance subsidies were preserved?
Again: what choice did they have? Keep the government shut down until January 2027? And, of course, shutting down the government actually gave Trump more power, because—as Klein notes in his opening paragraph—he has enormous discretion over which parts of the government to shut down and keep open.
And what if winning on the health care fight was actually a political gift to Donald Trump? Absent a fix, the average health insurance premium for 20 million Americans will more than double. The premium shock will hit red states particularly hard. Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s longtime pollster, had released a survey of competitive House districts showing that letting the tax credits expire might be lethal to Republican efforts to hold the House. Why were Democrats fighting so hard to neutralize their best issue in 2026?
The political logic of the shutdown fight was inverted: If Democrats got the tax credits extended — if they “won” — they would be solving a huge electoral problem for Republicans. If Republicans successfully allowed the tax credits to expire — if they “won” — they would be handing Democrats a cudgel with which to beat them in the elections.
This is why Senator Chuck Schumer’s compromise, which offered to reopen the government if Republicans extended the tax credits for a year, struck many Democrats as misguided. Morally, it might be worth sacrificing an electoral edge to lower health insurance premiums. But a one-year extension solved the Republicans’ electoral problem without solving the policy problem. Why on earth would they do that?
Here, Klein—who I genuinely think is a decent human being who cares about others—is falling into the same trap I called Jonathan Chait out for this morning. Sure, scoring political points and winning elections is important. But, goddamn it, do we really want to inflict a year of political pain on those who get their insurance through Obamacare just to send a message?
Yes, yes: elections have consequences. But we have a binary political system filtered through a Rube Goldberg set of institutions. The 2024 elections are hardly a perfect distillation of the preferences of the electorate.
For that matter, I bet some considerable number of those who rely on the exchanges for health coverage even voted for Kamala Harris. The notion that Schumer shouldn’t try to get them covered for the next year because it might damage Democrats’ performance at the ballot box is beyond cynical.
In any case, Republicans were not interested in Schumer’s offer. Trump himself has shown no interest in a deal. Rather than negotiating over health care spending, Trump has been ratcheting up the pain the shutdown is causing. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers have been furloughed or fired. The administration has been withholding food assistance from Americans who desperately need it. Airports are tipping into chaos as air traffic controllers go without pay.
Here, Klein is mixing apples and oranges. Withholding food assistance, while perhaps legally justified, is indeed a cynical move. Ditto using a shutdown to fire employees; that’s unprecedented, unnecessary, and quite likely illegal. But furloughing workers? Not paying them? That’s what a shutdown is.
More than anything else, this is what led some Senate Democrats to cut a deal: Trump’s willingness to hurt people exceeds their willingness to see people get hurt. I want to give them their due on this: They are hearing from their constituents and seeing the mounting problems, and they are trying to do what they see as the responsible, moral thing. They do not believe that holding out will lead to Trump restoring the subsidies. They fear that their Republican colleagues would, under mounting pressure, do as Trump had demanded and abolish the filibuster. (Whether that would be a good or a bad thing is a subject for another column.) This, in the end, is the calculation the defecting Senate Democrats are making: They don’t think a longer shutdown will cause Trump to cave. They just think it will cause more damage.
And they are 100 percent correct.
If I were in the Senate, I wouldn’t vote for this compromise.
I’m not sure any Democrat but the defectors—and maybe not even all of them—will vote for the compromise. Ending the filibuster means that the Republican majoritiy can pass it on their own.
Shutdowns are an opportunity to make an argument, and the country was just starting to pay attention. If Trump wanted to cancel flights over Thanksgiving rather than keep health care costs down, I don’t see why Democrats should save him from making his priorities so exquisitely clear. And I worry that Democrats have just taught Trump that they will fold under pressure. That’s the kind of lesson he remembers.
Yes, by all means continue fucking over civil servants, food stamp recipients, and the flying public to send a message. (What message? Hell if I know.) And maybe some planes will crash into one another, killing a few hundred people. That’ll really get people paying attention!
But it’s worth keeping this in perspective: The shutdown was a skirmish, not the real battle. Both sides were fighting for position, and Democrats, if you look at the polls, are ending up in a better one than they were when they started. They elevated their best issue — health care — and set the stage for voters to connect higher premiums with Republican rule. It’s not a win, but given how badly shutdowns often go for the opposition party, it’s better than a loss.
Well, then, it was all worth it.
@DrJoyner
Have you not been paying attention? What the f**k do you think this administration has been doing for 11 f**king months? They’ve been screwing over those people AND MORE.
Short term pain vs Long term pain is a no brainer. Yet, you’re arguing better to not have short term pain and endure years of long term pain.
Makes no sense to cave now. None whatsoever.
@EddieInCA:
So what? ‘But Trump is already killing Americans’ is not a compelling reason for Democrats to indefinity help worsen MAGA’s killing spree.
Only the most privileged conservatives and liberals could dismiss families right now being unable to feed their kids as mere “short-term pain.” That’s not what Democrats believe. One party of nihilists is one too many. We don’t need two.
@EddieInCA:
I think a lot depends on what one thinks is possible to achieve.
People are going hungry now, and people can’t make their house payments now. While I agree that keeping this going through Thanksgiving would have garnered even more attention, I still can’t see what long-term goal would have been achieved.
I understand the desire to see fight out of the Dems, but none of this was ever going to force ACA subsidies to be restored.
What do you think that another week or month of this would have accomplished? This is an honest question.
Granted, I was not a fan from the beginning, but I just don’t see what practical outcome this was all supposed to produce.
@EddieInCA: My wife and I both work for USG; we’re beyond aware of DOGE and other attacks on the civil service. The shutdown did nothing to reverse any of that (except for the firings that occurred during the shutdown itself) or prevent such actions in the future. Nothing. And the stopped SNAP payments and turmoil at the airports were not part of the administration’s strategy before the shutdown, and there’s no reason to think that they’ll be part of it after.
@DK: That’s where I sit. I fully get the frustration and the desire to appear to be doing something. But when the something hurts millions of people and yet has no likelihood of success, it’s not helpful.
The Federal Reserve does an annual survey/finding about emergency funds. In 2024, only 48% of ALL ADULTS could cover even a $2,000 emergency. 52% would have to borrow or sell assets. I’m going to guess that the percentage of federal workers who could do the same is likely lower, maybe considerably so.
Am I angry that the ACA subsidies don’t have a more stable path? YES. If we can find the funds to cut taxes for billionaires, we can find a way to extend–or, how about this? MAKE PERMANENT–the ACA subsidies.
Let’s not forget that many people have gone without pay for over a month.
And maybe federal employees can remember that they HAVE healthcare, but that many of their fellow Americans won’t if the ACA continues to be intentionally sabotaged by Republicans.
Republicans also don’t have the ability to pass legislation.
The Democrats don’t hold the cards they need to get what they want, and neither do the Republicans. The Republicans would have to change the game — kill the filibuster — to do it.
The President has a lot of power to direct some of the pain, but only for so long. But he couldn’t keep it off the airline industry forever.
The Democrats in the Senate caved because they were worried about their flights home for Thanksgiving. That’s it. They got together, decided who wouldn’t be facing the voters anytime soon and could afford to piss off their base, and then they collectively picked the 8 sacrificial lambs that wouldn’t be least likely to actually get sacrificed.
And every Democratic Senator should be hounded and harassed and not get to enjoy their Thanksgiving.
You know, this was the longest shutdown ever.
That means that Democrats held out longer than Republicans ever did. If it makes them look weak, that’s only because they didn’t have the votes.
Frankly, I think it’s about the best you could ever expect from a shutdown.
@James Joyner:
The impact on airlines was the first pain the relatively wealthy were feeling. And the Democrats collapsed after 48 hours.
Letting the workers suffer and sacrifice for 40 days is all well and good, but messing up flights was just unacceptable.
If we are going to break Trumpist Authoritarianism, it will require that the people who are most insulated from the immediate effects of it to actually feel a bit of pain. There needs to be that feedback so they know that supporting the lunatic party hurts everyone. Democrats folded immediately when that particular pain began to happen.
@Jen:
Absolutely fair—although our coverage gets considerably more expensive and provides considerably less coverage every year.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Since Republicans were willing to go to court to ensure Americans starve, rather than fund Obamacare subsides, there was nothing more to get except perhaps shaving 1-2 more percentage points of Trump’s approval rating.
Worth hungry households and planes dropping out the sky? Nah.
Democrats won the argument. They helped their 2025-2026 candidates put affordability and healthcare costs on center stage, contrasted with Donald Antoinette’s Gatsby parties, gold ballroom, and Argentine bailouts. They juiced their turnout and won a vibe-shifting off-year election. They drove down Trump’s popularity.
But decent people can only tolerate so much chaos and pain. Starving kids is diminishing returns. At that point in the gamble, yes, cash out your winnings and come back to the blackjack table next month.
@Gustopher: What is your evidence that the flying public is disproportionately Trump supporters? We’ve re-sorted considerably over the last decade. College-educated voters are overwhelmingly Democratic now. And I suspect the elderly, who remain in the GOP column, are less likely to fly than the younger cohort that tends to vote Democratic.
@Gustopher:
Nonsense. They had the ability, its just that ability was never put to the forefront as it should have been. The message from Democrats should have been We will not vote to continue to harm Americans, The Republicans have control of all branches of the government. They can pass whatever they like to continue to do so. They have the power, they are in control. The fact that even the media continue to support the filibuster as sacrosanct is asinine. It is not democratic. It needs to go…….yet it lives on to help even more future shut downs.
@DK:
Pushing the killing spree in another direction so the some of the people who support it or are indifferent to it also get killed is the only way that the killing spree will stop.
When people feel safe, they’re willing to look the other way. When they see that they are only safe for the moment and not even that safe, they are much more likely to act.
Hail Trotsky, or whatever.
@James Joyner:
Commercial flight — cargo, etc — would also get screwed up, and that affects the businesses. Business owners are largely Republican.
ETA: Also, the people who can afford to fly are largely the people who aren’t feeling immediate pain, and who can look away and ignore the administration’s actions most comfortably.
@Gustopher:
Is the pro-killing lobby paying you to say this? Serial killers may believe that but I don’t. Fortunately, neither do Senate Democrats.
The way to stop Republicans from destroying healthcare and SNAP is for Americans to give up their destructive and irrational and destructive Democrat Derangement Syndrome and join 85-90% of black voters in consistently voting for Democrats in every election.
It’s cray so many left and right will instead twist themselves into overcomplicated knots trying to play 4D chess.
This won’t be received well….
Imagine you have taken hostages and threaten to kill one of them if your demands are not met, and imply later you’ll kill others. And the other side instead of begging you not to or acceding to your demands, says “Hold on. We’ll send you a dozen more hostages!”
I’m not suggesting the Democrats took hostages or threatened to kill anyone. It’s the analogy my brain came up with.
@James Joyner: In our family of two, we pay an amount for insurance coverage that next year will be our single largest household expense. Our (high deductible) insurance coverage is more than our mortgage, property taxes, and homeowners insurance COMBINED. That’s *without* counting out-of-pocket expenses.
I will lose that coverage when my spouse qualifies for Medicare. My ONLY option, given a few preexisting conditions, will be coverage on the exchange–if it still exists in a few years when I need it. Coverage under an individual policy will not be an option for me, as I’ve had skin cancer (any cancers at all pretty much renders one uninsurable at any rate). The survival of the ACA is deeply personal for me.
Politics isn’t a game? Then what was this I played in 1970’s before moving to Florida. 50 years have passed but I can still remember the electoral totals for every state back then. Florida 17, South Dakota 4, New Jersey 17, etc etc.
The favorite game of every member of the House and Senate is to defeat members of other party. What happens is members forget they have citizens to represent and not do harm.
@DK: The Democrat Senators picked the worst time to cave.
The poor and the government workers will always be the first to feel the effects of a shutdown. That’s a given. That sacrifice is entry stakes. And no one gives a shit about them, they suffer and it will not affect policy or support for either party. Sad, but true.
The decrease in air traffic was the first moment that the effects were also being felt by business leaders, the upper middle class, and the wealthy — cargo is incredibly important. Caving as soon as those people feel the slightest discomfort means that hurting the poor and the government employees was absolutely worthless.
Roll over immediately to avoid hurting the poor and government workers, or stick to it long enough to bring the pain to other people where it can be effective. Either is ostensibly defensible. I definitely think sticking to it would have been the better choice, but pick your battles, etc.
Folding now is not.
Don’t pull the trigger on a long shutdown unless you’re willing to let it hurt the people who might bring useful pressure on the administration. To do otherwise is just to hurt poor people for fun.
@DK:
Also, I too would like better Americans, but that isn’t going to happen in time for the next election, let alone the 2024 election.
It’s a game and it’s pain, our job should be to learn how to play the game and manage the pain.
Repeating from another thread: we were always going to lose but with a little planning we wouldn’t have had to lose ugly. There’s ignominious retreat, and then there’s Dunkirk, perhaps the best-framed loss ever. Had we pulled off a Churchillian loss, we could have left the Republicans with a Pyrrhic victory. Instead we just look weak. Again.
Do Democrats only read about Sojourner Truth and Harvey Milk and never learn anything about the history of war?
@Gustopher:
According to Charlie Kirk types and privileged liberals who had no trouble feeding themselves last week. Serial killer vibes.
Many selfish, privileged leftists don’t really give a shit about the poor, not unlike the Never Hillary style leftists who pretended to care about Gazans then threw them under the bus by withholding support from Kamala Harris.
But I do give a shit about them, and so do the Democrats who declined to be indefinitely complicit in helping Trump further harm them. Hence why they’ve actually won elections and y’all haven’t and never would.
@Gustopher:
Democrats turning into the type of people who will help kill Americans of any class so our most unreliable coalition voters feel better isn’t going to happen either — not in time for the next election, or ever.
Incidentally, as long as we’re on the subject of fantasy, also file Republicans killing the filibuster, or caving on Obamacare subsides, or suddenly not being fascists under Things That Were Not Gonna Happen.
If Americans can’t be better people — where “better” includes finally accepting that black voters are right about the need to vote for Democrats — then there’s no reason to waste time whining and crying about either party or politics at all. Because in that case, the USA is well and truly doomed. Anything short of Americans being better is so much rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
But expecting Democrats to behave as sadistically and nihilistically as Republicans — to bail Americans of their stubborn and wrongheaded failure to elect Democrats when fascists were at the gate — is a nonstarter. So those who desire that from Dems should settle on a different, reality-based tactic. Or actually get off their butts and win elected office / build another “Willing to Kill People To Get What I Want Politically” party — which our side’s extremely-online keyboard warrior strategists never do. Funny that.
Gustopher has it exactly right. “Don’t pull the trigger on a long shutdown unless you’re willing to let it hurt the people who might bring useful pressure on the administration. To do otherwise is just to hurt poor people for fun.”
The choices were not to shutdown at all, or extend it until people who matter to Trump were getting hurt. The D’s chose the worst of all options. And Trump and the R’s will continue to hurt the poor and marginalized, whether the D’s cooperate, “become complicit”, or instead stick to the accurate argument that this is a situation created by the R’s, perpetuated by the R’s, and the responsibility of the R’s to fix. After all, as we keep being reminded, D’s have no power over legislation, right?!?! Except apparently they had to cooperate to get it passed. Do our hosts and people like DK understand that “they have no power” and “they had to give in” are mutually exclusive? They made a choice to protect the filibuster, a choice to shutdown when they didn’t really mean it, and a choice to cave in the weakest, worst, possible way, immediately after a much-needed jolt of positive momentum from the elections. And don’t say it was only 8 of them–as has been noted they were chosen rather carefully to be D’s who don’t have to face the voters next year, and that means a lot of other D’s in leadership making behind the scenes deals and hoping to escape the fallout.
Oh, and James, over here in the private sector, my health care also gets significantly more expensive and less comprehensive every year too. DK, at least with SNAP I can (and did) contribute significantly more to food banks to help offset. But there is no real way to help the people about to lose access to health care. So spare me your moral certainty that you’re pure and the rest of us are just amoral losers. This was a complete failure of political leadership by the D’s – if they couldn’t hold their caucus then it never should have gotten this far.
@Just Another Ex-Republican:
Your inferiority complex is not my problem. Y’all haven’t won anything to indicate you know anything about political strategy. The insistence that Democrats should be complicit in the starvation of kids is deeply amoral — and selfish, nihilistic, and nutty. And there’s nothing at all to justify the weird certainty that prolonging the shutdown would have done anything to protect people losing healthcare thanks to Republicans.
If Americans want to protect and extend Medicaid, Medicare, SCHIP, and Obamacare there’s a simple solution to that: let go of the Democrat Derangement Syndrome and vote to elect the party that passed them into law, like 85-90% of black voters do. It’s really not rocket science. But white Amerikkkans left and right will come up with every excuse to do everything but that.
It makes no sense to ignore this person…
…who is replacing a Republican governor because she won an election, and instead listen to tantruming keyboard warrior online strategiests who’ve won jack squat, sniping from the sidelines.
Y’all failed to make a compelling case for starving kids and letting planes crash. Womp womp.
Just a tip DK, but the truth is you and I agree on just about everything politically-well over 90% I’m sure. I do vote for, organize with, and support Democrats, and have for decades now, right along with the Black Americans you claim to represent while dismissing me as some sort of racist pseudo-KKK supporter (where do you get off, anyway? You don’t even know me). There is not only no need for the name calling or insults, it’s actively counter-productive. I’ve earned my right to criticize Democratic leadership with significant amounts of cash (well into 5 figures by now) and time (on phone banks, mostly), so again, take your moral superiority and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine. This is an argument about tactics, not goals. Because guess what: Your insistence that Democrats should be complicit in making healthcare unaffordable is also deeply amoral. And that’s exactly what you are doing. There is no unabashedly good, moral, ethical choice here. Just a decision about who to screw once the shutdown started. Which, since this became the end result, never should have happened and represents a complete failure of Democratic leadership.
@Just Another Ex-Republican:
Shove your whiny inferiority complex down your throat and choke on it, it’s still not my problem. I didn’t mention you until after you put my name in your comment. You don’t like what I have to say, you’re welcome to scroll past.
No, Democrats refusing to help starve children any longer does not make them complicit in “making healhcare unaffordable” because there remains absolutely zero evidence that Democrats prolonging the shutdown any longer would’ve lowered healthcare costs. Tantruming keyboard warrior libs can repeat this bullshit lie over and over if it helps y’all feel better about your dumb, destructive Democrat Derangement Syndrome. But it’s still bullshit.
Democratic leaders were responding, understandably so, to arrogant nutjobs who still can’t admit Schumer was right all along to oppose shutdowns — which I said from the beginning, since March. Alone, as most lack the guts to do anything but blindly parrot Substack groupthink. Dem leaders did what the biggest losers in our party demanded they do, and they’re still crying and complaining. Full of shit. The day people who’ve actually won elections start telling this crowd to Fk Off will be the day normal people know they have the strength to help us defeat fascism.
Actually I didn’t put your name in my initial comment–I referenced it anonymously, mostly just poking fun at the obviously silly over-generalization that D’s are morally opposed to a shutdown as one they end up with the blame for causing ends. You’re the one who got personal and started calling anyone who disagreed with you immoral and immature. Why you’re so determined to gratuitously insult your nominal allies I will never understand.
But yeah, you have been added to my “don’t bother to read and just scroll past” list, so good luck and enjoy your “victory.”