The Briefing, Vol. XIII, Issue 11
Mar. 17, 2025
This Week:
- Dems’ popularity sinks to multi-decade low
- Shutdown avoided, which makes them rage even more
- Democrats’ Senate hopes dim further as Shaheen bows out
Outlook
Shutdown showdown: Last week was poised to become an historic moment.
Democrats, given the power to filibuster a government funding bill, were about to cause a government shutdown — a shutdown that would have been deliberately and unambiguously their fault and theirs alone.
What’s more, many of them on their party’s progressive wing were ready to take ownership of this outcome for the first time in modern history.
Such an action would have been highly off-brand. After all, Democrats are the party of big government. They have gone on the record over and over again when Republicans threatened or caused shutdowns, claiming that government shutdowns harm regular people and are terrible, horrible, the end of the world, et cetera.
The idea that Democrats would actually force a government shutdown would have been, to put it in sci-fi terms, a displacement of reality.
In the end, however, we never found out. That’s because they surrendered rather than force a shutdown.
Ten Senate Democrats voted with nearly all Republicans (except Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to keep the government running. On the surface, things thus remained boring as usual. But the story of how this happened is worth examining more closely.
Glitch in the matrix: The reason Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) voted against the continuing resolution was that it continued funding the government at essentially the same levels and with the same priorities as it had been funded under Biden.
Most Democrats had previously voted for a similar spending regimen. But of course, everything changed when Trump was elected president again. Their violent reaction against voting for these same levels of spending again, and their rage at Senate Democrats for doing so, is a clear red flag for voters. There are no principles at stake for them here — only their desire to embarrass a president by shutting the government down.
Suddenly, all the little people supposedly harmed by government shutdowns cease to matter. And that is to say nothing of Democrats’ threatened use of the filibuster, which many of them embarrassingly tried to abolish just a few years ago, when they held the Senate. (If Democrats ever do abolish the filibuster, they will regret it deeply when the entire constellation of New Deal and Great Society legislation propping up their movement is suddenly repealed. But that’s an argument for another time.)
Dems enrage their base: Progressives are outraged at the result of this budget battle, but they should not be. A Democrat-led government shutdown was just never going to work.
Democrats are the party of government. They have spent years demanding that government shutdowns be off the table in all disagreements over spending. Although it would have been very interesting to see a shutdown unambiguously caused by Democrats, it would have been a first in modern history. They thought better of it in part because they saw the writing on the wall.
As talk-show host Erick Erickson hinted last week on his show, Democrats may have also been put off because any shutdown would have effectively put Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought in charge of the federal government. There is no one in government they fear more than Vought.
At a moment when the officials running the executive branch are itching to shut any program down they can — without even a guarantee that federal workers will get their customary back pay after the shutdown — it may not have been the best moment for Democrats to force a government shutdown. And so they didn’t.
Schumer probably did the smartest thing he could have, in our estimation. But that is not good enough for his party’s leftist base. Not only are they calling for him to step down as leader, but Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.) is now hinting at primarying him in 2028 for his U.S. Senate seat.
Spoiled: Why all this rage, when Senate Democrats were clearly left without options? Here is perhaps the clearest and simplest explanation: The Left feels so entitled to power — either through the elected branches or the unelected permanent bureaucracy — that it cannot accept its current circumstance of impotence. Leftists are not used to even having to compromise, let alone having to accept adverse outcomes.
A temper tantrum is therefore the only remaining possible reaction. If you wonder why people have resorted to acts of terrorism against Tesla dealerships or even just Tesla owners, or why they are swatting conservative media figures, look no further.
Also, note that liberal rage will only get worse as the months pass and more appeals court decisions overturn the lower court rulings on issues in Trump’s favor ranging from immigration to federal contracting to federal layoffs to agency shutdowns.
Democrats have no answer to the Trump onslaught in government. And as they frequently lament, there is no built-in check because the Republican Congress supports what Trump is doing and has no intention of intervening.
Polls won’t cooperate: And the more shrill they get, the more out-of-touch they seem.
Democratic attempts to astroturf town halls and create the impression that Trump’s approval is cratering are also failing, since most national opinion polls simply do not bear this out. Indeed, a new CNN poll has found that Democrats have much more to worry about with respect to their own popularity.
Only 29 percent of respondents approve of Democrats’ performance in office, compared to 54 percent who disapprove. This is the worst number for Democrats since CNN began asking this question in the 1990s. And a plurality of Democratic voters (49 percent) are among those disapproving of their own party. This is a new development, since historically, Republican voters are more critical of their own party in Congress than are Democratic voters.
Similarly, a new NBC poll finds Democratic Party approval at just 27 percent versus 55 percent disapproval. YouGov and Quinnipiac found results similar enough that this cannot be written off as a statistical absurdity.
For that matter, Democratic pollsters have shared similar findings regarding the party’s relevance to voters’ concerns. According to the Democratic group Navigator Research, 69 percent of voters now believe Democrats are “too focused on being politically correct.” A 56 percent majority believe that Democrats are not looking out for working people.
Polls aside, all of the Democrats’ best talking points against Trump are also beginning to fail. Egg prices have suddenly plummeted. Overall inflation is also down. Employment remained stable in the February data.
For the moment, all that Trump’s critics have to work with is the stock market’s recent swoon, apparently based on his threats of tariffs. But what will they do if the market comes back, whether it be next week or next year?
In short, the opposition party still finds itself in a bottomless hole right now, falling endlessly and failing to find footing. This situation will surely not last forever, but it doesn’t look like Democrats have a fix they can apply any time soon.
Senate 2026
Georgia: The National Republican Senatorial Committee is already out with an online ad against Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), attacking him for voting for the government shutodown. Ossoff is viewed as easy pickings if Gov. Brian Kemp (R) runs against him, but polls suggest that he has a decent chance of surviving if Kemp chooses not to run.
New Hampshire: Seventy-eight year-old Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) announced her retirement last week — another huge blow to Democrats, who will now be defending three open seats in swing states next fall.
Gov. Chris Sununu (R), faced with the opportunity to make actual policy in the U.S. Senate, is reportedly reconsidering his aversion to the Senate. An NH Journal poll from the beginning of March showed him to be a clear favorite even over Shaheen. In an open-seat race, he may be a prohibitive favorite.
This creates a massive new headache for Democrats. Just given the Senate map, retaking the Senate was already a two-cycle project for them, at least. But a loss in any of New Hampshire, Michigan or Minnesota (where Sen. Tina Smith (D) is retiring) makes it at a three-term project or more. Democrats may not control all the levers of power until well into the next decade, when the electoral map will be skewed more heavily against them due to reapportionment, as we discussed in an earlier issue.
