"The conventional wisdom about government shutdowns is that they always fail. Senate Democrats probably assumed as much when they shut down the government. Perhaps they thought they were giving partisan activists something to root for, even fleetingly, before eventually caving. That was a reasonable, if somewhat cynical, calculation. The odd thing is that the shutdown was actually working for Democrats, but in a way that some Democratic senators did not fully internalize, and which makes their ultimate capitulation tonight much harder to understand."
"The reason shutdowns always fail is that the public eventually turns against the party responsible, applying more and more heat until its most vulnerable members feel compelled to give in. Presidents have little reason to give concessions to end shutdowns, because the bulk of the political pain is typically felt by their congressional adversaries. That did not happen this time. Polls found that the public narrowly but consistently placed the blame on Donald Trump and his allies, not congressional Democrats."
Senate Democrats initiated a government shutdown expecting eventual failure and to energize partisan activists briefly before conceding. The shutdown unexpectedly benefited Democrats because public opinion primarily blamed Donald Trump and his allies rather than Democrats. Trump behaved unlike prior presidents by refusing to fund programs authorized by Congress and by staging visible acts such as the unilateral demolition of the East Wing and a lavish Mar-a-Lago Halloween party hours before millions lost food stamps. Trump's approval ratings fell sharply during the shutdown, and he attributed Republican electoral losses to it. Democrats aimed to draw public attention to health care and demanded an extension of tax credits for individual-market insurance.
Read at The Atlantic
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