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The Democratic crackup that’s now underway in Washington is distracting the party from a series of brutal fights just ahead that will culminate in next year’s midterms.
Democrats have one month to figure out how they want to handle a Senate vote on expiring health care tax credits; then they’ll face another shutdown deadline on Jan. 30. After that comes a round of House and Senate primaries — often featuring agitator candidates eager for a change in leadership and a more aggressive approach to President Donald Trump.
With all the challenges ahead, Democrats are descending into bitter clashes whose fault lines were foreseeable from the moment the government shut down. The shutdown’s challenges to Senate Democratic unity, in particular, were immense: Several members of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s caucus didn’t want to start a fight over health care subsidies at all. Others only wanted to hold out for a couple of weeks.
Instead, they kept at it throughout the longest shutdown in US history. So when the bare minimum of eight Democratic senators split off, advancing a shutdown-ending deal that’s set to clear the Senate later Monday, the rest of the party erupted in fury, from coast to coast.
Democrats’ path to regathering themselves doesn’t look smooth or short. The gains they tallied in off-year elections less than one week ago feel like a distant memory. Some of their leaders want to give it time.
A “big party” and “a healthy party” means “you’re going to have internal disagreements about votes and strategies and tactics,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, the deputy whip, who opposed the deal. “We can’t push it any faster than it needs to go. People need to sort through what they think about all of this.”
Schumer wanted the party to keep up the fight past the Nov. 1 open enrollment period for 2026 health benefits and urged his members to keep blocking a funding bill this week, according to a person familiar with caucus dynamics.
“The division occurred because those eight [Democratic caucus members] believed the danger of the shutdown exceeded the benefits of continuing the fight on health care with the shutdown in effect,” the person said.
The resulting anger is aimed at far more than those eight senators, though their deal to reopen the government is getting torn to shreds by the rest of the party. House Democrats are accusing senators of “surrender” and Senate candidates are calling for Schumer to step down as leader.
Democrats’ midterm candidates practically climbed over each other to denounce the deal — even some who have good relationships with Schumer. Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., who has praised his leadership, denounced the “empty promises” Democrats had extracted from Republicans.
Stevens’ rivals in the Michigan primary, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and physician Abdul El-Sayed, released videos that characterized the deal as everything wrong with Congress.
Progressives said the party had picked the right fight but stopped before finishing the battle.
Faiz Shakir, the founder of More Perfect Union and political strategist for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told Semafor that the shutdown “defined the Democrats around expanding health care,” and that keeping that focus would mean them “fighting for it at every turn.”
Democrats should have been encouraged, he said, when Republicans began arguing over their own health care plans last week, including ideas like expanded health savings accounts that lacked popular support.
But Shakir also acknowledged the steep hill yet to climb, saying that “Democrats have eight weeks to come up with a potential solution” on government spending and health care.
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Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., made a point to approach Majority Leader John Thune during Sunday night’s vote about the South Dakota Republican’s promise to grant Democrats a vote on the health insurance subsidies.
“Eight of us are sticking our neck out so that you’re going to keep your word. I hope you will,” Durbin recalled telling Thune. “He said, ‘I assure you I will.’”
Yet Democratic critics have panned Thune’s promised vote as a fig leaf; it had been on the table for weeks. Durbin and his seven aisle-crossing colleagues got a few other victories out of the GOP — but even if a health care deal can be reached in the Senate, there’s no guarantee Republicans in the House will take any action.
The party’s big Election Day gains in New Jersey and Virginia, credited to its message on the cost of living, “created a lot of optimism that maybe we could get a victory here on health care,” said Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt. He opposed the deal to reopen the government.
That Democratic optimism, though, didn’t account for Trump’s iron grip over the GOP.
“We had made a very risky decision. The Democrats are always for keeping government open and not inflicting pain on the people we care about,” Welch said, praising his colleagues for sticking together for as long as they did.
Senate Democrats see next month’s health care vote as the key to putting pressure back on Republicans, who are divided over whether to keep the premium tax credits alive in any form. The shutdown, they argue, has guaranteed that their push on health care continues long after the government reopens.
“We’re going to be completely unified, and then the Republicans are going to have their own sense of division,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., one of the eight who supported the deal. “Not that people’s feelings go away, but there are new issues that come up that grab folks’ attention.”
The party’s base, in fact, is still in its feelings. Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible, said his group was organizing two calls to action after the shutdown deal: One was to support Democratic primary candidates who didn’t or wouldn’t have voted to end the shutdown, and the other was calling for the House to tank a deal without health care funding.
“You’ll never understand Democratic congressional thinking if you think ahead,” said Levin, scoffing at the idea that the party set itself up well for another fight.
Room for Disagreement
Many Republicans were reveling in yet another round of Democratic infighting. Not Sen. Shelley Moore Capito. The West Virginia Republican said she’s “not savoring it.”
“Having been in that position before, where you want to do the right thing and you’ve got to buck the trend a little bit — or a lot, in this case — I think it’s unfair for them to turn on their own like that,” she said.
Burgess and David’s View
No one who follows politics closely is going to completely forget about this week. The Democratic division over funding the government in March, which Schumer supported, hung over the decision to shut it down this fall.
He will continue to be harangued from the sidelines, though Democratic caucus members show no desire to jettison their leaders.
But when the shutdown is over, the media and the public will move onto the next issue. And since Democrats get to call the next play on health care, it’s in their interest to regroup in time to — as Kaine said — look more united than the GOP a month from now.
Notable
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In he New York Times, where his September column urging Democrats to fight helped move them toward a shutdown, Ezra Klein argues that Schumer’s colleagues “elevated their best issue” but may have taught the president that they would cave even on that.
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In the Atlantic, Jonathan Chait asks whether the party made a huge mistake, because goading Republicans into killing the filibuster “ultimately have been a win for Democrats.”
