The Election in the Shutdown

On Sunday, November 9, eight Democrats voted with Republicans on a procedural measure to move ahead on funding the government, separating that from continuing tax credits on the Affordable Care Act, which are scheduled to expire January 1. Until this vote, extending the Affordable Care Act credits had been a key condition to Democrats voting to end the 40-day government shutdown. The Democrats voting to begin the process of ending the shutdown were Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.

Democratic social media posters vented frustration, calling for various senators to resign, be replaced, etc. Some went so far as to advocate blatantly counterproductive actions such as changing voter registration from Democrat to independent. But as Princeton history professor Kevin M. Kruse put it, “… the answer isn’t to abandon the [Democratic] party …. The answer is to take it over and transform it.”

Punchbowl News reports that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer did not participate in negotiations with Republicans to end the shutdown. Instead, retiring New Hampshire Senator Jean Shaheen negotiated directly with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.). According to Shaheen, Schumer was kept informed and did not interfere with her outreach to Republicans. In the end Schumer voted against the deal but seemed to be the primary target of outrage from the left side of the Democratic party. His response has been to highlight positive political aspects of the outcome, declaring from the Senate floor “The American people have now awoken to Trump’s health crisis.”

Political observer Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel.net), suggests that Democrats holding out longer might have increased public focus on issues such as former California  representative (and current gubernatorial candidate) Katie Porter’s calling out Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy allowing private jets to continue to fly while commercial flights were being curtailed. The Wall Street Journal described the issue as related to measures intended to limit the workload on air traffic controllers “increasingly stressed and fatigued after going weeks without pay” during the government shutdown. However, Wheeler notes, the issue is likely to continue even if/when the government actually reopens, because of increased air traffic controller retirements during the shutdown.

Wheeler also suggests that people despairing about the Democrats’ “cave” re the Affordable Care Act (ACA) may not be considering the full impact that the loss of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits is having on recipients. Following judicial wrangling over the past weeks, shortly after the Senate passed the bipartisan measure that could begin the end of the shutdown a Boston appeals court for the second time rejected the Trump administration’s appeal of a stay on a Rhode Island judge’s order that it pay SNAP recipients their full November benefits. Wheeler acknowledges that restoring SNAP benefits, as would occur with the compromise agreement now working its way through the Senate, would to some extent mitigate the loss of ACA tax credits. She argues, however, that Trump administration behavior such as “bullying states for sending out food stamp benefits that Trump’s own administration sent out … would have become more clear” if Democrats had been able to hold out even a few days longer.

In a thread on social media site BlueSky, America Governance Institute’s David Schuman drills down into the bipartisan action in the Senate. First off, he notes that the deal was coordinated with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. The Democrats “were not freelancing,” he writes, and the Democrats voting for the so-called “deal” “are the ones furthest from electoral consequences.” He characterizes Republicans as playing “good cop, bad cop, [and] crazy cop.” In this schematic Senate Republicans are the “good cops,” House Republicans are the “bad cops,” and the executive branch including Trump and OMB director Russell Vought are the “crazy cops.” Schuman quips that “the government was shut down the first day Trump entered office. We just don’t talk about it that way.” Schuman describes appropriations as “the only real leverage” Democrats had in the current Congress, which, in his view, leader Schumer squandered in voting for the Republican stopgap funding bill in March. Democrats did get something out of the shutdown, Schuman suggests – they were able to protect the Government Accounting Office from the nearly 50 percent cut to agency funding proposed by House Republicans. This of course assumes the proposed measures survive the remaining congressional legislative process. Notably, it is also not a gain, but protecting something that was threatened. Similarly, Schuman notes, the proposed bill reinstates government workers laid off during shutdown, prevents reductions in force (RIF) until January, and guarantees that federal workers be paid after the shutdown ends.

Dems showed (a) it's possible to get something out of "shutting down the government" despite what the pundits said, and (b) that they could hold together for 40 days. It's not a policy win, but it changes expectations for what they can do in the future, strengthening their negotiating position.

Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall highlights the distinction between “the deal itself and where the deal leaves Democrats and the broader anti-Trump opposition.” Although he refers to the deal to end the shutdown as a “fumble,” he highlights that the shutdown itself and Democratic voters’ demands “got their representatives to shift a lot,” adding that voters need to “keep demanding more, keep up the pressure and keep purging the Senate caucus of senators who are not up to the new reality.” One outcome of the shutdown is that “Democrats now own the affordability issue,” Marshall writes, “and they’ve focused it on health care coverage, which Republicans want to make more expensive or take away altogether.” The ACA tax credit vote scheduled for December as part of the bipartisan Senate agreement Marshall calls “basically fake,” but argues that it will keep affordability in the public consciousness.

We’re in a battle for at least the rest of this decade that will require a very different kind of Democratic Party — not one that is more right or left but one that is both comfortable using power and knows how to do it. So I’m going to take this big step in the right direction I’ve seen over the last month and pocket it and move on to the next battle…. [D]on’t tell me nothing has changed or that this is some cataclysmic disaster. It’s not. This accomplished a lot. It demonstrated that Democrats can go to the mat when the public is behind them and not pay a political price. It dramatically damaged Donald Trump. It cued up the central arguments of the 2026 campaign. It just didn’t go far enough.

Political commentator Brian Beutler, in an interview with the New Republic’s Greg Sargent, draws a contrast/comparison between the current political moment and the machinations of the Tea Party movement circa 2008. Republicans were “deeply unpopular,” and unlike Democrats today had just lost elections badly. Republicans did not fire the party leadership, however, and nonetheless in the 2010 congressional election took control of the House of Representatives, gaining 63 seats. Beutler suggests that “something similar could absolutely happen this time around, where Chuck Schumer continues to frustrate Democratic voters, liberal voters, pro-democracy voters, and they nevertheless turn out in record numbers to elect Democrats next November.”

In his November 6 post-election analysis The Bulwark’s Joe Perticone declares that this year’s election “saw the collapse of the supposed 2024 Trump coalition.”  Republicans like House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.) pushed the narrative that majority-Democratic states and municipalities elected Democratic candidates, but this seems to Perticone and other observers to be a case of denying reality. Trump voters “rejected the first year of what they’ve seen,” Perticone tells the New Republic’s Sargent in an interview. Trump, Perticone says, “is being treated like a normal politician.” His administration says “it’s all good” but the general public is saying “no it’s not.” 

Trump, says Perticone

… gets this, like, a jester’s privilege -- which is kind of a medieval term—where, you know, because he’s a liar, and because he’s always joking or not telling the truth, everyone just kind of brushes it aside as, 'Oh, that’s how he acts.'

But we can see now that people are at least saying, 'That’s not true, you’re not doing it for me the way you said you would.' And that’s toxic in politics.

As the New York Times’ Nate Cohn reports, “it wasn’t simply because more Democratic-leaning voters showed up to the polls while more Republican-leaning voters sat out. The Democratic candidates also succeeded at winning over a modest but meaningful sliver of President Trump’s supporters, based on exit polls and authoritative voter file records.” In fact, according to Cohn, in Virginia and New Jersey, “Democratic gains were driven slightly more by flipping Mr. Trump’s supporters than by benefiting from a superior turnout.” And in New Jersey, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill won 18% of Hispanic voters who had voted for Trump last November.

Web site Public Notice and Bolts online magazine highlight several races beyond the headlines:

• Voters in Maine rejected a measure that would have restricted voting by mail – something that older voters and those with disabilities rely on.
• In Douglas County, CO voters ousted conservative school-board members who had voted to require parental permission for high school students to participate in a state health survey rather than the current anonymous data gathering policy from which students can simply opt out.
• In Pennsylvania’s Erie, Lehigh, Northampton, and Lucerne counties, which Bolts' Daniel Nichanian characterizes as “swing-y,” Democrats either flipped the county executive to Democrat or retained a Democrat in office.
• Also in Pennsylvania, in a contest that received some publicity, Democrats retained their 3-seat majority on the state supreme court. Republicans very much wanted a majority on the court ahead of the 2028 presidential elections. (Wonder why …?)
• JD Vance’s half-brother Cory Bowman lost his challenge to Cincinnati’s Democratic mayor, Aftab Pureval, by the largest margin since it started electing mayors directly (2001), 78% to 22%.
• In the first Democratic statewide victories in Georgia since 2006 for any non-federal office Democrats flipped two seats on the Public Service Commission.
• Connecticut Democrats flipped mayor or first selectman in 30 towns.
• In addition to winning the race for governor, in the best election for Virginia Democrats since 1967 they flipped 13 seats in the House of Delegates, giving them nearly a supermajority, and increasing the probability that they will redraw the state congressional districts to increase the number of Democrats in Congress by three or four.
• Bastion of the right, Miami, FL, gave 36% of the vote in its mayoral contest to Democratic County Commissioner Eileen Higgins. Second place finisher former police commissioner Emilio Gonzalez, who was endorsed by Governor Ron DeSantis, came in second with 19% of the vote. Former city commissioner Ken Joseph Russell came in a close third with 18% of the vote. With no candidate fielding more than 50% of the vote it now goes to a runoff on December 9, which Democrats can win if they coalesce behind Higgins.
• In Mississippi, which held special elections this week after redrawing state legislative districts under court order, Democrats ended the Republican supermajority in the state senate for the first time since 2019.

The races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia received considerable media attention.

In Virginia, former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger, who represented Virginia’s 7th congressional district until January 2025 was elected governor, succeeding Republican Glenn Youngkin. She is the first female governor of Virginia. Spanberger’s appeal in Virginia may be related to her centrist tendencies. For example, she voted against Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House, but nonetheless often voted with Pelosi on issues. Like Democratic candidates across the 2025 election, Spanberger focused primarily on affordability, and especially jobs – a major issue in Virginia, home to more than 340,000 federal workers.

New Jersey elected former Navy helicopter pilot Mikie Sherrill governor. She was elected to Congress in the so-called “blue wave” in 2019 during the first Trump presidential term. While in Congress her roommate was … Abigail Spanberger. In something of a contrast to Spanberger’s campaign, Sherrill emphasized her willingness to stand up to Trump. Electricity costs were a major focus of Sherrill’s campaign; she  to declare a state of emergency in connection with electricity costs on her first day in office.

But the most closely watched election was probably that for New York City mayor, in which Democrat Zohran Mamdani defeated Republican Curtis Sliwa, and former NY Governor Andrew Cuomo who ran as an independent. Current mayor Eric Adams had been in the race but withdrew in September. Mamdani won with 50.4% of the vote, compared to Cuomo’s 41.6%, and Sliwa with 7.1%. Mamdani is the first mayoral candidate to receive over one million votes since John Lindsay in 1969, and is the youngest person to be elected mayor in over 100 years. Billionaires including Mike Bloomberg, Trump supporter Bill Ackman and others spent millions of dollars supporting groups that backed Cuomo and opposed Mamdani. Donald Trump had also weighed in, with a somewhat lukewarm endorsement of Cuomo, urging voters to vote for him “[w]hether you personally like him or not….” Mamdani addressed Trump directly in his victory speech, saying "Hear me, President Trump, when I say this: to get to any of us, you will have to go through all of us."

Contrasting the victories of left-leaning Mamdani in New York City, and more centrist Spanberger and Sherrill with their national security credentials, the Guardian’s David Smith notes that “the antidote to Trumpism” is neither wholly progressive, nor wholly centrist, but “all of the above.” 

The Democratic party is a glorious melee of different constituencies and viewpoints in contrast to the brittle monoculture of the Trump cult. What unites it ahead of next year’s midterms is a desire for fighters rather than folders and for a relentless focus on the affordability crisis even as the president flaunts power and wealth.

Speaking to MSNBC, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez underscored Smith’s point. “I don’t think that our party needs to have one face,” she said. In Virginia that can be Spanberger, in New Jersey, Sherrill, and in New York City, Mamdani. “Our country does not have one face,” she continued. “It’s about all of us as a team together, and we all understand the assignment.”¹

¹As this article goes live Trump has signed a bill ending the shutdown. The vote in the House was mostly along party lines, with six Democrats voting with Republicans and two Republicans voting with Democrats.