Base Anger Management

Let's hope that's not the shutdown objective

Our team’s greatest strength and weakness is we’re not DC people. There are obvious downsides to being detached from the dominant geographic (and psychic) center of your industry.

But an upside is that detachment makes it easier to escape what

Nate Silver

calls "Demthink":

The problem with Demthink is not merely that it tends toward cynical triangulation. No, it’s that it tends toward triangulation that isn’t even politically effective because it’s so finely tuned for the in-group that it comes across as uncannily out-of-tune to everyone else.

Living outside of Demthink is my excuse for not understanding who shut down the government and why.¹

I. Whose Shutdown?

Obviously, Democrats want people to say “Trump’s shutdown” and Trump wants people to say “Democrat shutdown.”

I may be missing something, but …

• Haven’t Democrats spent the last seven months publicly arguing about whether or not to shut down the government?

• When a Democrat was president and Republican legislators withheld votes to continue funding the government, wasn’t that a “Republican shutdown”?

• Doesn’t the shutdown end when seven more Democratic Senators “cave” like they did in March?

This is not to say that shutting down the government - or "‘withholding votes” - is necessarily a bad strategy. Maybe it makes sense to own it as a method to focus attention on something like the looming healthcare disaster of Trump’s making.

But my slow fortysomething dad brain struggles to grasp how people would not eventually view it as anything but a “Democratic shutdown.”

II. Why Shutdown?

Let’s take it for granted that Democrats have finally decided to do something, whatever you want to call it. It seems like there are broadly two arguments for doing so:

• Democrats need to shut down the government because it is immoral to fund steps toward authoritarianism. The Resistance ‘base’ demands it.

• A shutdown is the best way to drive attention to Trump’s least popular policies, namely cutting healthcare subsidies.² Swing voters need to understand the looming healthcare disaster is Trump’s fault.

There are merits to both these arguments. But these are two distinct audiences: high-information anti-Trump activists, and low-information swing voters.

And two distinct messages for when a shutdown would end: when the authoritarian threat is diminished, or when healthcare subsidies are increased.

III. Listening to the Winners

Who voted to avoid a shutdown? Three swing state Senators, and then (via the Wall Street Journal)

… two other House Democrats from districts Trump won. Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, who had voted with Republicans on the House version of the bill, and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, who was absent but said she would have supported the measure.

Golden said Democrats were assuming that they wouldn’t be blamed for the shutdown. However, he warned in his newsletter: “The more likely outcome is Americans look at the finger-pointing in Washington and blame all of us.”

Republicans in the House didn’t need Democrats to pass their measure when they approved it earlier this month. The Senate, however, requires bipartisanship, with a 60-vote threshold needed to advance most legislation. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority.

In the wake of Trump’s victory, Democrats have been deeply fractured. Centrists have said that the Democratic Party has been taken over by its left flank, which is pushing them to make unpopular decisions that turn off independent and moderate voters needed to win elections. That left flank, meanwhile, has complained that party leadership has lost their trust too, which has kept Democratic voters from turning out.

This fight is “a microcosm of Democrats’ larger problems, where the decisions are being made by people who are afraid of an AOC primary, and the people getting hung out to dry are the ones who have to work around the clock to get re-elected,” said Liam Kerr, the co-founder of a super PAC aimed at electing centrists. Kerr was referring to New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive superstar, who is considering a primary challenge to Schumer in 2028.

When asked Monday if Schumer should remain Democratic leader if he caves, Ocasio-Cortez said: “My hope is that we do not see a replay of what happened in March and that we are moving forward together.”

It is worth reading Golden’s newsletter, along with his statement on “the demands far-left groups are making for Democratic Party leaders to put on a show,” and MGP’s statement in full. Even if you support a shutdown, their perspectives as overperforming Trump-district winners should inform the overall view of the situation.

Georgetown’s

Matt Glassman

has a reality check on why Democrats will struggle to have a single, coherent message that would be beneficial to frontliners:

The Dems don’t need round the clock talk by 30 different people with 75 different arguments about 9 different issues. They need a simple 1 minute message that they all agree on and repeat when asked. (Spoiler: they don’t have it and won’t have it).

This isn’t really their fault, it’s structural. 250+ elected legislators are backing this shutdown, and everyone one of them sees the *why,* the *why now,* and the *until when/what* somewhat differently. It’s just really hard to unify about something so open-ended.

IV. Understanding The Groups

OK, so the strategy is difficult. And the outside groups make it more so.

Back in March, we called the shutdown negotiation “playing chess while getting yelled at.” And this shutdown is a good reminder that the people yelling are very organized and have leverage in a caucus that is dominated by members from very blue states and districts:

It is hard to overstate just how much the median Democratic elected official fears progressive activists more than they fear swing voters.

Democrats hold 47 seats in the Senate. The median Senator is from the 12th most-Democratic state - Illinois, which Kamala Harris won by 11 points.

This distance between medians is even more dramatic in the House, where Democrats hold 215 seats. The median Democrat is the 108th most-Democratic - by one measure, that is Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district, where Trump got 34% of the vote.

Being a modern Democratic politician isn’t 5D chess, it is more like playing regular chess in the park while surrounded by an angry mob of alleged supporters demanding that each individual move of a chess piece be an exciting offensive maneuver.

For 90% of Democratic elected officials, the primary election is a greater threat than a general election. Appeasing angry supporters with each individual move trumps winning the game.

To understand the activist groups whipping up this anger, you need to understand they are not focused on their alleged missions. It is a major problem in political philanthropy, called out explicitly by some of the largest players in the Democratic ecosystem.

For instance, here’s Alex Soros on Sunrise Movement:

“What the hell do they do, by the way? We give them money, and now all they do is talk about Palestine. It’s ridiculous.”

Here is Dmitri Mehlhorn, from a 2022 interview with

Micah L. Sifry

Most of the network-building on the left, including a lot of it that I funded at places like Indivisible, have helped make sure that urban Democratic districts elect people like Omar and AOC and Jayapal and Khanna. The CPC [Congressional Progressive Caucus] is nationally positioned as the future leadership of the Democrats and the average CPC leader is in a D+19 district. Worse, they are overwhelmingly urban, and lean heavily into the kinds of issues that get Democrats crushed in rural areas (elevating the centrality of student loan relief is another brilliant idea from the crowd that claims to know what rural noncollege Americans want). The problem is that if you invest in long-term power-building, you get where you invest, not what you want.

This is not just a problem on the left - Mehlhorn also notes it was a problem for the Koch brothers during the Tea Party, where organizations were hijacked by extremists. This has specific negative effects in high-stakes negotiations:

Similarly, when my donor network moved several million dollars to Indivisible, none of us knew that Indivisible would sabotage Biden’s critical BIF victory.

We believe Indivisible is the “Weak Tea Party,” and along with other unaccountable outside groups whipped up significant anger at Democratic members in the spring.

Their penalty? Axios reported recently that they are now “in Schumer’s private war room on government shutdown.”

The same groups slammed Schumer earlier this year for caving on government funding. This time, the Democratic leader is playing to his base.

• Multiple progressive groups told Axios that they’ve had weekly meetings and conversations with Schumer and his team over the last two months.

• In the private talks, grassroots leaders have stressed the need for Schumer and Democrats to fight harder against President Trump and Republicans.

• Backing down and helping fund the government, like Schumer did in March, is unacceptable, the groups have told his team.

Sam Stein

of

The Bulwark

said last night that “Dems losing three of their own senators on the first vote is a clear indication of where this thing ends (though the signs were there already). Base anger management now the objective but there is a case for ripping the bandaid off quickly.”

In Conclusion

“Base Anger Management”. Ugh, what a world. There are many organized groups and individual leaders who want decisions made by threat of a primary challenge. A bad dynamic!

We have low confidence in any specific prediction about the shutdown. Not our area of expertise, and in general we think that overconfidence in predicting complex situations is an industry-wide problem in politics.

But we’ve spent a decade studying progressive advocacy groups, and can tell you that appeasing them will not work out well. At all. The progressive left is our version of the Leopards Eating Faces Party.

Back to our humility about this complex situation: hey, maybe the shutdown is a good idea.³

For the shutdown to be a good idea for Democrats, the ‘base anger management’ strategy has to be false. And most of the following things have to be true:

1. Chuck Schumer is going to win a public argument against Donald Trump

2. Donald Trump will not benefit from the resulting increase in chaos

3. A resolution results in Democrats prioritizing a tangible policy (healthcare subsidies) and targeting communications to key demographics (swing voters) over elite activists and their concerns

That is certainly possible.

At this point, let’s just hope it is correct.

1. We do have to pay attention to the shutdown, though, because it is highly relevant to both the Welcome-supported incumbents and challengers who we need to win back the House

2.

Nate Silver

suggested tariffs as a focal point for the shutdown bargaining; the mounting federal debt was also potentially interesting.

3. One case this morning from

Matthew Yglesias

: “whether or not it works, Democrats get multiple news cycles about the expiring Affordable Care Act premium subsidies. The Democratic position on this is very popular, but the issue had received almost no news coverage until the shutdown grew near. If Democrats don’t get what they’re asking for on this, they’re at least dramatizing the ask, and when premiums soar next year, they’ll have already set up the argument that it’s Trump’s fault.”