Aside from robbing Capitol Hill reporters of their sleep, Democrats don’t have much to show for their weekend shutdown.
Things were different just three days ago. Headed into the weekend, Democrats had plenty of reasons to be optimistic — President Trump’s unpopularity and a favorable electoral map chief among them. A generic congressional ballot promised good things, with 56 percent of the electorate picking Democrats and just 38 percent the Republicans. Taking back the House seemed more than probable and the Senate, possible.
But Minority Leader Chuck Schumer shut down the government and nothing has gone to plan since. In their zeal to force an immigration reform package into a routine spending bill, Democrats blocked the Children’s Health Insurance Program from being fully funded and the lights from staying on in federal agencies.
Now Schumer and company must explain how the president is the real obstructionist for refusing to roll over on his single most defining campaign promise. As the National Review’s Rich Lowry points out, even Sen. Ted Cruz wasn’t that crazy in 2013, and for good reason: Two days of shutdown already appear to have upended the electoral odds.
According to a new CNN poll, just 49 percent of the electorate would vote Democrat and 45 percent Republican if pushed into a voting booth today. While that mirrors the numbers ahead of the 2006 midterms, when Democrats won back 30 seats and the majority, it is still a double-digit backslide for the Democrats. If the shutdown continues at this rate, Speaker Paul Ryan might well keep his job next year.
The damage is subtler but more immediate in the Senate, where five red-state Democrats broke ranks and voted to keep the government open. Because of Schumer, those senators were forced to alienate their base and reach across the aisle in order to avoid alienating moderates.
If the White House had shown any sign of caving on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, maybe all of this would have been a decent strategy. But Democrats mistook early signs of flexibility as weakness. Attempts to pin the blame for the shutdown on the president have only made Trump and his base even more aggressive.
Everything was going their way until the shutdown. Now Democrats are flirting with catastrophe when victory seemed imminent just days ago.
