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.
