As we hurtle toward an almost inevitable government shutdown, I want to note one part of the discussion I’ve seen among commentators. This is a bit in the weeds but I think it’s worth discussing. Some writers say that it’s actually a mistake for Democrats to make any policy demands in the budget standoff. So health care, pushing back on ICE, standing up for democracy … regardless of the specific demand, it’s a mistake. I noticed Bill Scher making this argument today in The Washington Monthly. I’ve seen TPM alum Brian Beutler in his Off Message substack newsletter. And these are only a couple of examples.
The argument goes like this.
These shutdown standoffs are technical budgetary questions. The side that is making policy demands is basically taking the budget hostage to extract extraneous policy concessions. Based on the evidence of the last 20-30 years of history, that side is the one who gets blamed for the shutdown because they’re “taking the budget hostage” or introducing extraneous demands even if those demands are good ones on the merits or even supported by the public. Beutler focuses on the “hostage taking” metaphor. Scher puts it this way:
Every past attempt to use government shutdowns to extract policy concessions has failed, even when the policy demands are politically popular, because shutdowns make people forget what you have to say. Public attention shifts to how shutdowns hurt average Americans and how one political party is willing to harm constituents to play political games. Once public opinion quickly turns, the shutdown agitators invariably realize the shutdown failed to provide negotiating leverage and eventually cave.
It makes it easier to write a strong, coherent piece if you argue that the other guys are wrong and then demonstrate why they are. I can’t do that here. Because I’m not sure that they’re wrong. But I also don’t know that they’re right and, more importantly, I’m not sure how they’re so sure of it either.
This seems to be a pretty established understanding. But I don’t think there’s much evidence for it either way. We’ve had more than half a dozen major government shutdown dramas over the last 30 years, stretching back to the first ones in 1995-96. In all but two of these cases, it’s been a Democratic president facing off against Republican power in Congress, usually but not always in the House. It’s true that Republicans were generally judged to have “lost” those confrontations, though there’s a good argument it did them little or no harm in subsequent elections. This seems like good evidence for the “hostage takers take the blame” theory. But I’ve always thought that there’s a plausible alternative theory which is that Republicans tend to take the blame because they’re the party generally hostile to government and government services. It makes sense that they’re wanting to shut the government down, and it simply isn’t credible think the Democrats do since they’re the party of government. It’s similar to how Republicans never get hurt when Democrats — even plausibly — claim Republicans are weak on defense or not supporting the military. Republicans are the more bellicose party, the party of militaristic foreign policy. It just doesn’t pass the laugh test for most voters to think that Republicans aren’t pro-military enough.
The one real example where the partisan shoes were on the other foot I think tends to sustain my alternate theory. There was a brief shutdown under Trump in early 2018. But it only lasted two or three days. Democrats caved quickly but without any real evidence they were losing the fight. More significantly, there was an extended series of shutdowns under President Trump in the winter of 2018-2019. The fight was about funding the border wall. Who was doing what was complicated by the fact that the drama started with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress and then concluded with them only controlling the Senate. Trump being Trump, the president did a number of things to take ownership of the shutdown. He eventually gave in and agreed to sign a short-term continuing resolution. He promised he’d shut things down again when that CR ended. But he ended up declaring an emergency and taking money from another program to fund the wall. In other words, he decided to ignore Congress and get the money elsewhere. Polls showed pretty clearly when it was all over that the public mostly blamed Trump.
You could certainly draw from these examples that Republicans always get blamed no matter what. There’s actually some limited case for that, for the reasons I’ve noted above. But let me be clear: I’m not trying to argue this alternative theory. Beutler and Scher could be right about this. I’m simply saying we shouldn’t overstate what we know about who gets blamed in shutdowns or the political mechanics of how they work. Because I don’t think we know very much.
What we can draw from the polls over the years is that people don’t like shutdowns (hardly surprising) and that they don’t seem to have a big impact or perhaps any impact on subsequent elections regardless of who is blamed. There’s also some evidence that blame gets assigned (again not terribly surprisingly) mostly on the basis of which party voters are supporting in general. The prospective polls right now point to that outcome: polls suggest that slightly more voters will blame Republicans than Democrats. And that seems pretty similar to the numbers in the current congressional generic ballot.
For what it’s worth, Scher argues that Trump has squandered whatever gain he might have gotten from Dems making explicit policy asks by canceling his meeting with Democratic leaders, saying he won’t negotiate and adding that his admin plans to fire thousands of government workers to pressure Democrats. That sounds right to me. He does seem to be taking steps that you’d take if you wanted to be sure you were held responsible for the shutdown.
This may seem like a kind of picayune detail in the overall shutdown storm. It is a bit niche. And let me state again that this policy asks argument could be right. I just don’t think there’s a lot of evidence for it, and not nearly enough to give it a driving role in determining strategy. I note the topic because I think it’s important not to overthink this, not to be too clever by half. We don’t have enough data to say who gets blamed in a shutdown and why. Our limited evidence doesn’t seem to support the “policy-asking group takes the blame” theory. The best approach is to sound reasonable, by which I mean don’t speak flippantly or indifferently about the real costs of a shutdown; be ready to talk, unlike President Trump, who is flatly saying he refuses to negotiate. But mostly have what you say be some version of what you’re actually trying to do.