What Were Democrats Thinking?

Democrats’ case for the government shutdown was just starting to break through to voters. Why fold now? Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This column read was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Jack McCordick. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Marina King, Emma Kehlbeck and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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• 0:31Ezra Klein?

  Back in September, when I was reporting out my piece on whether Democrats should shut down the government, on why they 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 at least, which parts of the government stay open and which parts close down. It is very, very, very hard for the opposition party to win a shutdown. Which makes it somewhat remarkable that Democrats, Democrats were winning this one. Polls showed most voters blamed Republicans, not Democrats, for the shutdown. Maybe because instead of negotiating with Democrats like other presidents would have, President Trump

• 1:14Ezra Klein?

  was bulldozing the east wing of the White House to build a ballroom and throwing Great Gatsby parties at Mar-a-Lago while he canceled food assistance for hungry families. Trump's approval rating has been falling as polling going down. In CNN's tracking poll, he dipped into the 30s for the first time since he took office again in this term. And last week, Democrats absolutely wrecked Republicans in the elections. And you could really argue whether or not the shutdown was part of that, but you know who thought it was part of it? Donald J. Trump. And so Democrats, as of a few days ago, were riding higher than they have been in months. They were winning. And then, over the weekend, a group of Senate Democrats broke ranks and negotiated

• 1:56Ezra Klein?

  a deal to end the shutdown in return for, if we're being honest, very, very little. The guts of the shutdown deal are this: food assistance, both SNAP and WIC, the Women, Infants and Children program, they get a bit more funding. Then, if you look at other parts of the appropriations process, there are some other modest concessions on spending levels elsewhere in the government. You have a deal for laid-off federal workers to be rehired, for furloughed federal workers to be given back pay. But the deal does nothing at all, nothing, to extend the expiring Affordable Care Act tax credits, over which Democrats ostensibly shut the government down in the first place. All it offers is

• 2:36Ezra Klein?

  a promise from Senate Republicans to hold a vote on the tax credits in the future. And most of the government here is funded only until the end of January. So get ready, we could be doing this again in a few months. I think to understand what happened here, you need to understand the strange role the Affordable Care Act subsidies always played in the shutdown. Democrats said that the shutdown was about the subsidies, but for most of them, it really wasn't. It was about Trump's authoritarianism. It was about showing their base, showing themselves that they could fight back. It was about treating an abnormal political moment abnormally. Imagine an alternative world where we have President

• 3:19Ezra Klein?

  Nikki Haley, and she does none of the authoritarianism, none of the corruption, but has the same healthcare policy as Donald Trump. Are Democrats shutting the government down in that world? I don't think they are. But in this world, there were a number of Senate Democrats, even with everything Donald Trump has done, who didn't want the shutdown. Whatever they thought of Trump, they didn't think a shutdown was going to stop him. Instead, it was going to hurt people they cared about. It was going to degrade services they fought to protect or even to create. And then there was another group of Senate Democrats who doubted that their voters cared that much about masked ICE agents and Trump's corruption. Democrats,

• 4:00Ezra Klein?

  they argued, already had the votes of anyone worried about masked ICE agents. What Democrats needed were the votes of people worried about the cost of living. The AC subsidies emerged as the shutdown demand because it's the only one that could keep the caucus united. It put Democrats on the right side of public opinion, even self-identified MAGA voters, one of the subsidies extended, and it held this quivering Senate coalition together. And if they couldn't do that, there was never going to be a shutdown at all. But it meant the shutdown is built on a cracked foundation. There were Senate Democrats who didn't want to shut down in the first place, and then there were Senate Democrats who did want to shut down, but they were never really committed to this one exactly.

• 4:44Ezra Klein?

  They thought it strange to make their demand so narrow. Was winning on healthcare premiums really winning the right fight? Should Democrats really vote to fund a government turning towards authoritarianism so long as the AC subsidies are preserved? And then there was this odd wrinkle. What if winning on the healthcare fight was actually a political gift to Donald Trump? Absent a fix, the average health insurance premiums for 20 million Americans will more than double next year. This premium shock will hit red states particularly hard. Tony Fabrizio, Trump's longtime pollster, had released a survey a few months back of competitive House districts, showing that letting the tax credits expire might be lethal

• 5:29Ezra Klein?

  to Republican efforts to hold the House. And so in the background, there was this question, why were Democrats fighting so hard to neutralize what might be their best issue in 2026? It meant the political logic of the shutdown fight was weirdly inverted. If Democrats won, if they got the tax credits extended, they'd be solving a huge political problem for Republicans. They'd be doing something good, but possibly at the cost of being able to do more good things in the future. If Republicans successfully allowed the tax credits to expire, they'd be handing Democrats a cudgel with which to beat them in the elections. This is why Chuck Schumer's compromise, which offered to reopen the government if Republicans extended the tax credits for a

• 6:12Ezra Klein?

  year, struck many Democrats as misguided. Morally, it might be worth sacrificing an electoral edge to lower health insurance premiums. Sometimes you solve problems at a political cost, but a one-year extension simply solved the Republicans' political problem without solving the policy problem in the long term. Why on earth would you do that? In any case, Republicans were not interested in Schumer's offer. Trump himself has shown no interest in a deal. Rather than negotiating over healthcare spending, he's been ratcheting up the pain the shutdown is causing. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers furloughed or fired. The administration has been withholding food assistance from Americans who desperately need it.

• 6:54Ezra Klein?

  Airports are tipping into chaos as the air traffic controllers go without pay. More than anything else, this pain spreading throughout the country 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. This is a moral position. It's easy to talk about the politics of a shutdown, but if you are a senator, you are hearing from your constituents, you are seeing how many people are in pain, you are seeing what might break in the future. It's tough. And some of them feared that as the pressure mounted, their Republican colleagues would do what Trump was already demanding they do and just abolish the filibuster. They wouldn't cut a deal. They would just change the rules.

• 7:39Ezra Klein?

  Now, whether abolishing the filibuster is a good or bad thing, that is a subject for another column. But these Senate Democrats, they don't think it's a good thing. And so this, in the end, is a calculation they were making. They didn't think a longer shutdown would cause Trump to cave. They just thought it would cause more damage. More damage to the country, maybe more damage to the Senate. Are they wrong? It depends how you look at it. Of the dozen or so House and Senate Democrats I spoke to over the weekend, most thought they could have gotten a better deal if they'd held on longer. But none of them thought they would have gotten that much better of a deal. Trump himself wasn't budging, and congressional Democrats are too frightened to negotiate around him.

• 8:22Ezra Klein?

  So if you're just asking about this as a policy negotiation, the margin could have changed, but I don't think a huge victory was on the horizon. That's it. If I were in the Senate, I would not vote for this compromise. I don't think shutdowns—certainly not this shutdown—was just a policy debate. Shutdowns are an opportunity to make your arguments, and the country was just starting to pay attention to what the Democrats were saying. If Trump wanted to cancel flights over Thanksgiving because he was so opposed to keeping healthcare costs down, I don't see why Democrats needed to save him from making his priorities so exquisitely clear to the American people. And I worry—I worry the Democrats have just taught Trump that they will fold under

• 9:06Ezra Klein?

  even mild pressure. That's the kind of lesson Trump remembers. The Democrats saying they can come and do another shutdown after ending this one for so little, I am skeptical. At the same time, to keep this in perspective, the shutdown was a skirmish. It was not the real battle. Both sides were fighting for position, and Democrats—if you look at the polls—they ended up in a better one than they were when they started. They elevated their best issue: healthcare. They made clear who was on which side of it, and they set the stage for voters to connect higher premiums with Republican rule. It's not a win, not a total victory—I wouldn't tell you otherwise.

• 9:48Ezra Klein?

  But given how badly shutdowns often go for the opposition party, it's better than a loss.