Trump made a huge blunder on the shutdown. So why did Democrats cave anyway?

It's not entirely Chuck Schumer's fault, but the party needs new leadership.

Trump at a Halloween party at Mar-A-Lago. Getty Images.

I’ve never really been on the same page as Congressional Democrats when it comes to shutting down the government. In the spring, I thought they should pick a fight over Elon Musk and DOGE-related cuts, but they didn’t.

Then in September, I thought all their options were pretty bad. But that tariffs, not health care, would at least highlight President Trump’s unpopular handling of the economy and provide more of a pain point for Republicans — without offering a deal that could actually help the GOP in next year’s elections by extending popular health care subsidies.

Mind you, I didn’t expect Democrats to actually extract concessions from the GOP on tariffs. Rather, if Democrats held firm, Republicans would eventually have to pass a budget on their own by eliminating the filibuster — something that Democrats would rather be without anyway should they win a trifecta back in 2028.

And then once the shutdown began on Oct. 1, I disagreed with the conventional wisdom that Democrats were “winning” it. True, polls found that a slight plurality of voters blamed Republicans rather than Democrats. But those same polls showed that voters didn’t understand why there was a shutdown in the first place, and that Democrats’ message on health care wasn’t breaking through. Moreover, Democrats’ advantage on the “blame” question was eroding over time — while Trump’s approval rating actually improved initially once the shutdown began.

Then something changed — and I was getting ready to eat crow. Late last month, Trump’s numbers began to plummet, with his net approval rating falling from −7.5 on Oct. 17 to −13 three weeks later. It wasn’t a huge shift in absolute terms. But Trump has had a high popularity floor and a low ceiling. It was something real enough to contribute to Democrats absolutely crushing Republicans in a series of elections last Tuesday in New Jersey, Virginia and other states. Meanwhile, Trump was starting to feud with Congressional Republicans, urging them to “nuke” the filibuster when leadership was reluctant to do so.

So what did Democrats do with their newfound leverage? Over the weekend, they just gave up.

Yesterday, Senators Cortez Masto, Durbin, Fetterman, Hassan, Kaine, King, Rosen and Shaheen voted with 52 Republican senators¹ to provide cloture on the GOP’s appropriations bill. The shutdown isn’t technically over yet, but Republicans can now pass a budget bill on a party-line vote, so Democrats gave up all their leverage.

As someone who is supposed to take three cross-country flights over the next seven days, I’m happy that I won’t miss my meetings, I guess.

But as political strategy, I think this is malpractice. Predictable enough malpractice for a perpetually risk-averse party with a weak, unpopular leader who clearly doesn’t have confidence of his caucus. But malpractice all the same.

Trump made a big blunder on SNAP benefits

What happened in late October? There are a handful of plausible explanations, but I think the evidence is reasonably clear. On Oct. 18, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins warned voters that food stamps — more formally known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program or SNAP — would run out of funding at the end of the month. This program is a huge deal, affecting roughly 42 million Americans. Although Rollins tried to blame Democrats, voters didn’t buy that at all — not when the Trump has been fighting court orders to continue to fund the program, and holding Great Gatsby-themed dinners at Mar-a-Lago.

Google searches tell the story here. Since the shutdown began, searches for terms related to the Affordable Care Act — Democrats’ ostensible rationale for withholding votes — has never been more than a blip on the radar. Conversely, searches related to SNAP benefits increased roughly tenfold over their baseline beginning in late October:

There have been other stories in the news, but none of them had the staying power of SNAP. The No Kings protests were a big deal — and the timing lines up interestingly with the drop in Trump’s numbers — but only for 48 hours. Some pundits have tried to pin the blame for Trump’s approval decline on the destruction of the East Wing for the construction of a new White House ballroom, but searches for the White House were also a short-lived story with a much lower peak than either SNAP or No Kings. Meanwhile, as the FAA has announced a reduction in flights, searches related to flight delays have increased considerably in relative terms. But they remain modest relative to other news stories and postdate Trump’s approval decline anyway.

The increase in food-stamp-related searches has been far more persistent, as you might expect for a program that affects so many families.

Schumer’s strategy was fundamentally unsound

So why did Democrats cave? Look, some of the explanations are obvious enough. The risk-aversion thing is real: in Democrats are Villagers, not Riverians. Senators are privileged people who fly a lot, and the holiday travel season is forthcoming. Perhaps some Democrats felt like their wins on Tuesday provided cover. And the track record of parties trying to extract strategic concessions from shutdowns is basically 0-for-infinity.

But also, Schumer’s strategy was unsound and he never really had an endgame in mind after all. There were a series of interrelated problems with the party’s approach:

1. Democrats are essentially a leaderless party, with various political dynasties — the Clintons, the Cuomos, the Bidens, really everyone but maybe the Obamas — having been discredited. And Schumer himself is extremely unpopular, with a plurality of even Democratic voters having an unfavorable impression of him.

2. Schumer was so laser-focused on avoiding “blame” for the shutdown that he failed to articulate a positive case for why it was important to shut down the government for health care or other reasons. He wasn’t playing to win so much as not to lose.

3. Other Democrats weren’t all that consistent on the health care message either, with Democrats like Chris Murphy articulating alternative rationales for the shutdown and saying they couldn’t in good conscience fund a government they saw as authoritarian. It also probably didn’t help that Democrats were essentially doing their internal party negotiations in public in competing New York Times op-ed columns. They decided that they couldn’t fund the government without a fight, and then they backed their way into a rationale for it. But it’s not clear that their hearts were in the health care message. Relatedly, there’s a divide between the activist class, with their concerns about high-minded concepts like democracy and authoritarianism — I share those concerns, by the way — and the actual, rank-and-file party base, which is poorer, less progressive, less white, and more concerned about the cost of living.

4. Democrats’ approach to the shutdown was all about tactics as opposed to strategy. It’s not clear whether they actually wanted Republicans to nuke the filibuster. It’s not clear whether they’d have benefited if Trump had actually agreed to sustain Obamacare subsidies.

In strategic games like poker, when you find yourself in a no-win position — faced with the choice between calling, raising as a bluff, or folding, all options seem about equally bad — it’s frequently because you misplayed your hand at some earlier stage of the game. I know I’ve been persistent about this point, but Democrats never really thought through their shutdown strategy or some of the inherent contradictions within it. They were making it up as they went along.

And then, they were absolutely handed a gift by Trump on SNAP.

Part II of the poker analogy. If things go as well as you can reasonably hope for — you have a bad hand, but you catch the best possible card that at least gives you a good draw or something that can beat a bluff — and you still don’t know what to do, then your strategy sucked. You probably should have folded in the first place.

Yes, Democrats did get a few small consolation prizes out of the deal — thanks for playing. And the timing of Trump’s unpopularity spike² was fortuitous enough that they likely picked up a few extra seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, for example.

But it comes at the cost of the activist class feeling like they were sold a bill of goods. I was struck, for instance, by Brian Beutler at the newsletter Off Message calling on Democrats like Fetterman and Kaine who voted for cloture to resign immediately (!). I’m citing Beutler here because while he can frankly be partisan, he has a pretty good mind for strategy and his newsletter is at least consistently interesting. (You can find plenty of Democratic commentators who are an order of magnitude more partisan.)

Beutler is predicting “an internal civil war” within the party and I don’t know what to think about that. Anything that happened in the shutdown is probably not going to be top of mind for voters next year. D.C. and New York-based analysts don’t always have their pulse on how rank-and-file Democrats think. But there are a lot of potential downsides for Democrats if Tea Party-type-dynamics start to emerge within the party where leadership is completely distrusted.

Here’s the easy part: Schumer shouldn’t be Minority Leader. It’s untenable to have someone in that position when they don’t even have majority approval among their own party’s voters. The few Democrats who have tried to defend Schumer have claimed that he wasn’t one of the pivot points in the negotiation with Republicans to reopen the government. But if he wasn’t, why is he party leader? He’s already abdicated his role.

On balance, Democrats should still probably be feeling better about their party’s prospects than they did a week ago. I’ll always privilege election results over process stories. But this is a hell of a loss for the party to take after a week with so many W’s.

1. Rand Paul voted against cloture.

2. Although, as in past shutdowns, it’s probably mostly temporary.