The Democrats Finally Grew a Spine

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 who 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 off-ramp—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.)