Democrats’ sweeping election victories sent a tremor through Washington. The question is whether it is strong enough to knock loose negotiations to end the government shutdown.
Blowout wins in Virginia and New Jersey, coupled with comfortable Democratic victories in lower-profile races from swing-states Georgia and Pennsylvania to Maine and California, jolted the White House. For the first time, President Donald Trump admitted the stalemate over the government shutdown is hurting him and his party.
On Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump hosted Senate Republicans for breakfast at the White House, and addressed their party’s Tuesday drubbing at the polls.
Why We Wrote This
How will Democrats’ success in U.S. elections this week affect the politics of the government shutdown? Tuesday’s results unsettled the White House and could strengthen Democrats’ resolve in seeking leverage, even as both parties seek an off-ramp from the weekslong shutdown.
“The shutdown was a big factor, negative for the Republicans,” Mr. Trump said at the top of the meeting, while the media was still present.
Senators said the president was even blunter during the private portion of the meeting, warning his party that they were “getting killed” in the shutdown debate.
Since January, Democrats have been shut out of power in Washington while President Trump launched a flurry of actions and as their party’s base grew increasingly upset with him and with their own leaders. But their decision to force a shutdown to try to get him to negotiate to help lower health insurance prices, which are set to spike in the new year, has played out better politically than many of them expected.
Republicans have been arguing since the shutdown began Oct. 1 that Democrats would pay the price for this maneuver. But polls have shown for over a month that more voters are blaming the GOP instead. The president’s poll numbers are the worst he’s seen since he returned to office – 55% of Americans disapprove of the job he’s doing with just 42% approving, according to Nate Silver’s latest polling average. Tuesday’s results showed how that unpopularity could land in an election – and gave Democrats a sense of momentum for the first time since Mr. Trump won one year ago.
Democrats are insisting on an extension of subsidies to prevent huge spikes in premiums for Americans who get their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Republicans say they will not negotiate until Democrats vote to reopen the government. Because of the filibuster, a longstanding Senate rule that requires 60 votes to pass some types of legislation and gives leverage to the minority party, Republicans need a handful of Senate Democrats to vote with them in order to end the shutdown, and most Democrats have held firm against doing so without concessions from the GOP.
But while the president now seems to recognize the shutdown as a major problem for him and his party, his solution wasn’t to look for compromise with Democrats. Instead he called for what is commonly referred to as the nuclear option to end the filibuster – a nonstarter with Senate Republicans. Multiple Republican senators – including diehard supporters of the president – said after Wednesday’s meeting that they wouldn’t abandon their support of the filibuster.
“The role of the Senator is not just to advance good ideas. The role of a senator is to kill bad ideas. And when you’re in the minority – we’re not now, but we could be someday – it’s important to have a filibuster,” Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy said.
Democrats celebrated the apparent shift at the White House. Their main demand right now is for the president to sit down with them to negotiate a path forward, something he’s refused to do.
“Trump is the decider on this, so we need him and his head in the game, and from this morning’s conversation, it looks like he’s certainly finally turning to this. I hope we can meet with him as soon as possible and resolve this,” Michigan Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin said.
While the election might put pressure on Republicans to negotiate, it alleviated growing pressure on moderate Democrats to cave on their position.
Just hours before polls closed on Tuesday, Senate Democrats held an unusually long, reportedly tense luncheon to discuss a path forward. Some had expressed new openness to accept just a promise for a Senate vote on extending the Obamacare subsidies – a show vote that is almost guaranteed to fail – in exchange for reopening the government.
Multiple Democrats who have been involved in bipartisan discussions were evasive when asked if they would hold to their demand for a guarantee that the Affordable Care Act subsidies would be extended, versus just the offer of a vote.
When asked about where her moderate colleagues were landing on that question, Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin pivoted.
“I think given the turn of events yesterday and the president’s engagement on this, that the president needs to be personally involved, and we need to fix this. We need to lower the costs and extend the ACA credits,” she said.
The Democrats’ base, which demanded their party pursue this shutdown strategy, would see accepting the promise of a vote as capitulation. Now it’s clear that they’re not paying a political price for the shutdown – and may be benefitting from it – making a cave harder to justify.
That political reality is a cross-current to the real pain the shutdown is causing for Democrats worried about its fallout on their constituents.
The Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration announced Wednesday afternoon that they would force a major reduction in scheduled capacity at major airports across the country starting next week if the shutdown isn’t over by then, a move that would throw air travel further into chaos.
Money for key programs for vulnerable populations like Head Start is running out, and the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, hasn’t sent out money for benefits this month to millions of Americans who rely on the program to eat. (A judge has ordered the Trump administration to use emergency money to pay part of those benefits, though it’s unclear if or when that money will be distributed.) Many federal workers haven’t been paid their full salaries for more than a month.
Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, a moderate Democrat, has been part of bipartisan discussions. He hails from a state with a huge number of federal workers who are missing paychecks – and whose voters went big for his party on Tuesday.
He is floating the possibility of Democrats agreeing to a short-term continuing resolution to reopen the government for four to six weeks in exchange for a guarantee of a vote on the ACA subsidies – and a guarantee from the president that he’d abstain from laying off any more federal workers during that period. That would give both parties time to negotiate over an actual fix for spiking insurance premiums. He is worried that “we would do a deal and then the President would blow it up, and so I’m trying to get some assurances on that piece,” he told reporters Wednesday.
For weeks, Democrats have said they need President Trump to come to the table to negotiate, that they couldn’t do it just with Senate GOP leaders. The president clearly saw Tuesday’s results as a referendum on his shutdown strategy. The question now becomes whether he is ready to shift.
“We all know the president. If he’s interested in negotiating, you’ll know it pretty quickly,” said Republican Senator Kennedy.
Monitor staff writer Caitlin Babcock contributed reporting to this story.
