Welcome to Washington: Democrats’ Shutdown Strategy Is Working — for Now

Democrats are relishing the politics of the government shutdown, and for the time being, their message seems to be working. A fractured information environment, Americans’ concerns about costs, and the Democratic base’s desire to get under President Trump’s skin have given the opposition party an opening, though it is yet to be seen if key senators can pull the plug on the whole affair. Welcome to Washington, where the government is about to enter its third week of being shut down after Senate Democrats blocked a clean spending bill on September 30. Since then, senators have voted six additional times to block the spending proposal, with all but three Democrats voting no. Opposition party members in both the House and Senate are relishing in the fight. The minority leaders, Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, have been doing daily press events. House Democrats are roaming the halls of Congress with little to do besides get out their message and back up their leadership. Speaker Mike Johnson has kept the House out of session for more than three weeks. “Each day our case to fix health care and end the shutdown gets better and better — stronger and stronger — because families are opening their letters showing how high their premiums will climb if Republicans get their way,” Mr. Schumer declared on the Senate floor last week. “They’re seeing why this fight matters.”“But Republicans are absent. The House is literally on vacation,” he added. The polling so far has shown Democrats are winning the messaging war, though that could easily change. A Navigator Research survey last week finds that the issue on which Democrats are most trusted is the same issue that they have put at the center of their shutdown strategy — health care costs. Even among independents, those voters who do not affiliate with either major party gave Democrats a 19-point advantage on the issue of making health care more affordable. It doesn’t help the GOP that Mr. Trump polls poorly on the issue of inflation and affordability. The Harvard–Haris poll released last week finds Mr. Trump 12 points underwater on the inflation issue, with 53 percent disapproving of his job performance while 41 percent approve. Even worse is that 55 percent of voters told pollsters that they believe Mr. Trump’s policies are going to make inflation worse. The even more important number, however, is how Democrats feel about their own party leaders. The phenomenon that I have described before — the Democratic “Tea Party” — has reached Mr. Schumer’s ear, and now the base is rewarding him for it. The Navigator poll finds that 57 percent of Democrats believe that elected officials must battle Mr. Trump “all the time.” In November 2018 — as the opposition picked up dozens of House seats at the height of the so-called resistance — just 41 percent of Democrats said their leaders ought to fight the president at every opportunity. How Americans consume their information, too, is likely playing a role in all of this. One of the most critical voting blocs for Mr. Trump in last year’s presidential election was the swath of voters who pay little attention to the news, or receive their news through cultural commentary on podcasts or YouTube programs. Such shows are less likely to be explicitly political or partisan. For those voters, Democrats’ message is much more simple to understand: Republicans control the government, therefore it’s their fault that it is shut down. Obviously, it is not true that it is the GOP’s fault. Democrats working on Capitol Hill know that the 60-vote threshold must be met in order to pass any stopgap funding measure. Based on past surveys showing that a large swathe of Americans could not even name one of their own United States senators — or even identify which party controlled Congress — one can imagine how hard it is to get a critical mass of voters to understand arcane Senate procedure. It is clear at this point that there will be no grand bargain between Republicans and Democrats anytime soon. Unlike other government shutdowns, this one is not capturing the attention of the public to the same degree. Mr. Trump is off for his celebration of the peace proposal in Israel. Those House lawmakers who would actually be a part of any hypothetical deal are far from Washington. In the meantime, Mr. Schumer seems more than happy to let this play out, considering he said last week that “every day” his political position strengthens.

Welcome to Washington: Democrats’ Shutdown Strategy Is Working — for Now

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