A political scientist explains the Democrats’ bizarre shutdown strategy.
The longest government shutdown in modern American history is about to end, after a handful of Democratic senators this weekend decided to provide Republicans enough votes to pass a short-term funding plan that would keep the government running until the end of January 2027.
While there’s not much for Democrats to write home about in this deal, it’s also not clear that they could have ever really won the showdown — or any of the concessions they were originally making. Moreover, the deal doesn’t put the issue to bed so much as it kicks the can down the road for a few months — through January — before another vote to fund the government will be needed. That leaves a question: Will the country find itself facing another shutdown in just a few months’ time?
For answers, I turned to Matt Grossman, the director of the Michigan State University’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, as well as the host of the Science of Politics podcast at the Niskanen Center, where he’s a senior fellow. Grossman is an expert on Congress, policymaking, and partisan politics, and I found his perspective both clarifying and grounding. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.The basics of the deal
Was this shutdown appreciably or qualitatively different from previous ones?
This shutdown was different, because the Democrats were trying to win policy concessions and were strategizing about using the shutdown to do so beforehand. That’s rare.
It’s usually Republicans who instigate shutdowns and call for policy concessions. The last time something like this happened was in 2018, when the Democrats tried to win concessions on DACA [the federal program that extended protections for undocumented people brought to the US as children], but that only lasted a couple of days.
This one was a long shutdown and one where the Democrats were trying to win concessions. That is the difference.
What is your understanding of the argument for striking a deal that Democratic senators have made? Do you find it persuasive?
There’s not a ton of obvious logic to the deal, but this is typically how shutdowns end. You just don’t have a record of winning concessions on the basis of reopening the government. You tend to just get process agreements to move forward. So, that’s what happened here.
That said, I don’t think you can just evaluate the end of the shutdown; you have to evaluate the shutdown as a whole. And there, it’s hard to say that it was a worthwhile policy project for the Democrats to pursue. Were there specific political gains that made the shutdown worth it? I’m somewhat skeptical.
Defenders of the deal argue that the harm an extended shutdown would impose wasn’t worth the potential gains. What do you think of that case?
There’s no question that a shutdown is bad policy and it leads to harm.
