They are stuck making an artificial argument and undercutting their own case that what they are demanding is worth shutting down the government over.

As a general rule, it’s usually a bad idea in politics to run away from what you are doing. Nobody who’s against it will be fooled, and you’re less likely to get credit with the people who agree with what you’re up to. Instead, the better practice is both to defend the battles you fight, and fight the battles you have to defend anyway. As I wrote back in 2009 in my postmortem on the Bush years, “the Bush Administration often ended up being pilloried for having conservative policies without getting the benefit of actually enacting those policies. If you are going to take the heat for something, do it.”

For a month before the current government shutdown, there was a vigorous public debate among Democrats and their pundit and activist class over whether they should provoke a shutdown. Everyone involved in that debate understood and acknowledged that this was a choice. Ezra Klein, in a highly influential piece in the New York Times on September 7, framed it as a choice and argued in favor of a shutdown: “In about three weeks, the government’s funding will run out. Democrats will face a choice: Join Republicans to fund a government that President Trump is turning into a tool of authoritarian takeover and vengeance or shut the government down. . . . Joining Republicans to fund this government is worse than failing at opposition. It’s complicity.” In Klein’s telling, Democrats should do this precisely because it would offer an opportunity to explain why they were doing it:

The case for a shutdown is this: A shutdown is an attentional event. It’s an effort to turn the diffuse crisis of Trump’s corrupting of the government into an acute crisis that the media, that the public, will actually pay attention to. Right now, Democrats have no power, so no one cares what they have to say. A shutdown would make people listen. But then Democrats would have to actually win the argument. They would need to have an argument. They would need a clear set of demands that kept them on the right side of public opinion and dramatized what is happening to the country right now.

Moreover, Klein added, forcing a shutdown fight was necessary to rally dispirited and disaffected Democrats: “Democrats are this unpopular because their own side is losing faith in them.” Three days later, Leigh Ann Caldwell of Puck reported that Klein’s essay “immediately set the party on edge,” and quoted Dick Durbin saying it was “the most discussed thing in the caucus.” While Caldwell reported that some Democrats were angry at Klein, it was because they thought a shutdown would play poorly: “The only question is when the government’s money runs out, and how Democrats justify it. . . . As I’ve heard repeatedly on the Hill, Democrats are divided on if they should go to war over abstract notions like corruption or authoritarianism, especially in a funding fight. . . . [Chuck] Schumer is under an immense amount of pressure—from his caucus, from House Democrats, from his base, and yes, from Ezra. . . . It’s no exaggeration to say that Schumer’s political future is on the line.” On September 16, Stephen Neukam of Axios reported, “Scoop: Democrats lean into shutdown fight with alternative funding plan. . . . Democrats are preparing to make a shutdown fight all about health care, which they bet will win over voters.” At MSNBC, Symone Sanders argued for fighting: “Democrats have not yet decided whether they will supply the necessary votes that keep the government open. But this is not merely a negotiation over appropriations; it is a test of political courage. If Democrats surrender out of fear that they will be blamed for a shutdown, they will have handed Trump precisely the victory he seeks without forcing him to expend any political capital.” Michael Cohen responded, “Democrats think they can win a government shutdown. That’s a lousy bet. . . . Under pressure from their loudest supporters to stand up to President Donald Trump, [Congressional Democrats] are laying the groundwork to shut down the government at the end of this month. But while there are reasonable arguments in support of a shutdown, it’s a fight that Democrats would most likely lose, and they should do everything to avoid it.” Mychael Schnell reported, “Democrats are making Obamacare central to their shutdown strategy.
Democratic leaders have given Republicans an ultimatum on support for federal funding to avoid a government shutdown.”

Nevertheless, everyone involved in this debate understood the premise that Democrats had three choices: They could sign off on the continuing resolution that passed the House, had majority support in the Senate, and was backed by the White House; they could demand some modest concessions that Republicans would feel compelled to consider; or they could withhold their consent, shut down the government, and try to use that as leverage for major concessions. They have done the latter, even demanding the repeal of major pieces of the signature legislation passed by Republicans earlier this year. That approach is precisely what Republicans tried and failed at in 2013 in gunning for Obamacare repeal, and at the time, Democrats howled that this was undemocratic and terroristic because Republicans held only a majority of the House of Representatives and thus not any representative branch of the government. By contrast, Democrats now hold a majority of neither house of Congress, and they not only lost the 2024 presidential election but lost the national popular vote, so their argument for having a superior mandate to what the Republicans have is blessedly free of any connection to reality.

As Quin Hillyer puts it: “By very definition and by all procedural realities, the side that votes not to keep government open is the one that is ‘shutting down the government.’ This is not complicated: A vote to finance government operations is, yes, a vote to finance government operations. Every Republican in the House and Senate voted to finance government operations, while the votes against the funding all came from Democrats. . . . Republicans have been trying to keep the government open through Nov. 21 via what is known as a ‘clean’ continuing resolution: Current government spending levels and rules, across all agencies, would stay the exact same while negotiations continue, with no extraneous policy issues included.”

As I argued recently in the Telegraph, the initial problem is that Democrats are thus promoting two messages that are at odds with each other:

The problem for Schumer’s message . . . is that holding out for more Medicaid spending is the opposite of [Klein’s argument for] standing up for democracy. Rather than shutting down the government over unilateral executive actions, or presidential refusals to spend money authorized by Congress, Schumer is trying to undo the biggest thing passed by a Republican Congress. He’s trying to use leverage to win a victory he didn’t have the votes to get. It completely contradicts the Democrats’ theme that they’re the ones standing up for Congress and representative government. Schumer can speak all he wants, but money talks. So long as his key demand is for more Medicaid money, voters are apt to see through all his slogans about democracy.

Now, there were Republicans who think they can win the public argument in a shutdown fight, even though the press has typically blamed Republicans in the past and polls are running against them thus far. Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought is also the most prominent spokesman for those who think that a shutdown can be leveraged legally to cut the federal workforce and budget in ways that can’t be done normally. But it’s childish to treat these examples of bravado as a substitute for the reality that Republicans on Capitol Hill would prefer to simply fund the government and continue the status quo — as evidenced by the fact that they are voting to do precisely that — and that it’s the Democrats who have provoked a shutdown.

And yet, everywhere you look, the official Democratic messaging apparatus is thundering that the Republicans are the ones shutting down the government, and their side is piling furiously on anybody who suggests otherwise in the press. Partly this is just muscle memory from past shutdown fights and from being the party of government (even whilst arguing that said government is fascist), but it also reflects a sense that the voters don’t like shutdowns and don’t reward people for causing them. But that means that they are stuck making an artificial argument and undercutting their own case that what they are demanding is worth shutting down the government over.