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The wave election and the politics of shutdown

The Republicans got their clocks cleaned on Tuesday. You’d think they would want to cut their losses.

Tuesday’s results exceeded the Democrats’ wildest hopes. Since the election, Trump has been flailing on multiple fronts, blaming everyone but himself for the Republican losses.

Though the struggle to contain Trump is ongoing, the election made us feel a lot better about the prospect of redeeming American democracy. Wednesday’s arguments at the Supreme Court on Trump’s outlandish claims of unlimited executive power to order tariffs suggested that even justices who usually side with Trump have had enough.

Yet the election had paradoxical results where the resolution of the government shutdown is concerned. While there is growing public weariness at the growing effects of the shutdown—most recently the FAA’s cancellation of 10 percent of flights at busy airports—the election vindicated the Democrats’ strategy of refusing to approve Trump’s budget unless Republicans relented and backed continued funding for expiring subsidies for the Affordable Care Act and rejected deep cuts to Medicaid and SNAP.

The public has blamed Republicans more than Democrats for the shutdown, giving Democrats more leverage and stiffening their spines. Until Election Day, Democrats were on the verge of caving in to Republican demands to rubber-stamp Trump’s budget in exchange for meaningless assurances. Eight Senate Democrats were having back-channel negotiations with Republican colleagues. The election victory restored the Democrats’ caucus unity.

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut spoke for most of his colleagues when he said, “Tuesday was a watershed moment. The country, first and foremost, was making a referendum on Donald Trump’s corruption and his mishandling of the economy. But they were also making a statement about this fight.”

The Republicans are now stuck in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma of their own making. If they give real ground on the budget, Democrats can claim another victory. If they don’t compromise, Republicans will continue to be blamed for the shutdown.

And the Republicans are now split three ways. Senate Majority Leader John Thune seems inclined to seek some kind of common ground, but he is being cagey about what that might be. He has scheduled yet another Senate floor vote—the 15th on the budget—reportedly offering a separate vote on Obamacare subsidies in exchange for opening all or part of the government.

Trump has sidelined himself, refusing to meet with Democratic leaders and making demands that Senate Republicans don’t take seriously. Meeting with Republican Senate leaders before TV cameras, he demanded an end to the filibuster followed by votes to end mail-in voting and add prohibitive voter ID requirements. “If we do what I’m saying,” he added, Democrats will “most likely never obtain power.”

But there is no support for getting rid of the filibuster. Trump’s antics only increase the willingness of key Senate Republicans to oppose or ignore him.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson has said flatly that if Thune did give Democrats a separate vote on the Obamacare subsidies and it were to pass, it would never come to a vote in the House. So Thune’s latest mystery offer, even if a potential middle ground, would be dead on arrival at the House, giving Senate Democrats no reason to accept it.

Johnson has his own parochial reasons for wanting the shutdown to continue. By keeping the House out of session, he can continue to avoid seating Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva, who won a special election on September 23 to represent Arizona’s Seventh District. Grijalva will be the 218th vote to compel release of the Epstein files.

So while Senate Republicans are increasingly willing to cross Trump, House Republicans under Johnson are sticking to their old playbook in which unity in the face of a tiny and dwindling majority depends on slavish loyalty to an increasingly vacant president. But as Trump’s cultish magic increasingly fades, Republicans have less reason to fear Trump’s threat of sponsoring primary opponents and more reason to worry about being beaten by Democrats.

Trump, meanwhile, followed his usual plan of changing the subject, threatening war against Nigeria. On Thursday, the Senate narrowly defeated a resolution that would have blocked Trump from attacking Venezuela, under the War Powers Act. The vote was 51-49, with two Republicans, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voting with Democrats. The resolution failed only after a classified briefing in which the administration committed that there were no plans to attack Venezuela.

A DICTATOR, ARMED WITH THREATS OF RETRIBUTION, is all-powerful until he isn’t. Republicans are now fracturing, and Democrats, almost in spite of themselves, are united.

The most remarkable thing about Tuesday’s election was not just the Democratic sweep but how normally it went off. The Justice Department’s half-baked effort to intimidate voters with election monitors in New Jersey and California failed utterly. Nobody took seriously Trump’s claim of election irregularities, and the energized turnout among Democrats is likely to build on itself and counter suppression efforts in 2026.

It is premature to declare the 2025 elections and the politics of government shutdown a turning point. To paraphrase Churchill, after British forces won a desperately needed victory at El Alamein in 1942, this is not the end of Trump. It is not even the beginning of the end of Trump. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

–ROBERT KUTTNER

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