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This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 11 episode of “All in With Chris Hayes.”
Last week, on election night, Democrats, in almost every race, from coast to coast, rolled up Republicans. That came just weeks after organizers estimated seven million people took to the streets in 25,000 communities for the “No Kings” protests against Donald Trump. And all of this happened during the longest government shutdown in U.S. history — one that Trump’s administration has tried to use to gut the government, at the expense of his approval numbers.
What we do know is that the deal does not look like what Democrats were fighting for.
Every political indicator had been moving in the Democrats’ direction, which is what made what happened over the weekend so puzzling: A group of seven moderate senators and one independent senator took the air out of their coalition’s sails and accepted a Republican deal to fund the government and end the shutdown.
In that deal, Democrats did not get the one thing they had been fighting for: an extension to the Biden-era federal subsidies on Affordable Care Act health plans. Those subsidies will expire at the end of the year, forcing big rises in insurance premiums for about 20 million Americans.
As MSNBC reported, the deal mirrors what Senate Majority Leader John Thune floated weeks ago: “Reopen the government now, and Republicans will later give Democrats a vote on extending the expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies.”
Will that vote actually happen? Who knows. If it does happen, will enough Republicans vote to save the subsidies? Again, who knows.
What we do know is that the deal does not look like what Democrats were fighting for — and a lot of people, including many of those moderate senators’ colleagues, are really frustrated. It doesn’t help that the senators who took the deal are doing a uniformly terrible job of articulating why it had to be done, and now.
“There were two goals, both of which I support,” independent Sen. Angus King of Maine told “Morning Joe” on Monday. “One was standing up to Donald Trump. The other was getting some resolution on the ACA premium tax credit issue. The problem was the shutdown wasn’t accomplishing either goal.”
According to King, “standing up to Trump didn’t work, it actually gave him more power.”
I think it is fair to say that statements like that are incredibly dispiriting, indeed enraging, to millions of people who marched last month and voted last week. They deserve a clear answer for why this is happening.
I can think of one big reason that nobody has really made explicit yet: Democrats by and large sincerely want the federal government to function for the American public, even when they’re out of power. Republicans, on the other hand, generally couldn’t care less.
This has been the dynamic in Washington through my whole career. That is why I took Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, one of the Democrats who voted to fund the government, at his word when he told reporters on Wednesday, “I got the first good night’s sleep last night that I’ve gotten since Oct. 1 because I wasn’t worried about being able to look Capitol Police in the eye when I walked in, or what a furloughed federal worker would say to me at church, or what somebody would say to me about their SNAP benefits.”
It’s clear Democrats care about people getting their benefits. Throughout this shutdown, Trump and Republicans have come out and said they do not care about subsidies for an insurance program named for Obama. They do not care about the more than 40 million Americans who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. They say SNAP is a Democratic program.
In fact, the Trump administration went to court and fought with everything it had to deny SNAP funds that were sitting in a contingency account.
The Republican strategy throughout the shutdown has been to turn up the pain dial. They looked for ways to make Americans hurt more, including trying to lay off furloughed federal workers, fighting the courts to avoid funding food stamps and crippling the country’s air traffic control system.
People recognize this. It is why Trump’s approval ratings are down and Republicans are losing elections.
It should be easy for Democrats to tell this story and show voters that they were the ones desperately trying to give Trump and Republicans an opportunity to save themselves and to help the American people by keeping their health care costs under control.
The Republican strategy throughout the shutdown has been to turn up the pain dial.
That they were holding together because they didn’t want to pile misery on top of misery — an aim that was both achievable and reasonable, but the Republican wrecking crew was holding millions of Americans’ lives and livelihoods hostage in increasingly dire conditions.
But because there is only one responsible party in Washington that genuinely does care about a government functioning for people, it came back to the Democrats again. And a splinter group made the calculation that the balance of pain was getting out of whack.
Politically, it sucks and it does make Democrats look weak. But I also don’t think this is a lasting political failure for Democrats.
Now, it’s not a small thing that people are now going to get their SNAP benefits and federal workers will get their paychecks and some of the administration’s layoffs have been rolled back. That is not nothing. It is a lifesaver for millions.
But it’s important to acknowledge that this shutdown put ACA health care subsidies front and center in the national conversation. It gave a voice to millions of Americans who are already seeing how their health insurance costs will rise and it highlighted how little Republicans care.
The lesson here for Democrats is that they took a high-leverage, high-risk strategy that actually paid pretty big political dividends — before the more risk-averse members of the caucus called it quits.