Post-Shutdown Deal, Trump Is Still A Weak Lame Duck & The GOP Is Still Politically Toxic
The backlash to the Dem shutdown deal is real, but the political fundamentals haven’t changed. Trump is weak, the GOP is toxic, and they will own the outcome if ACA subsidies aren't renewed.
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If you open up any social media app since Sunday, Democratic celebrations over their seismic 2025 election wins have been replaced with cries of “Democrats caved!” Maybe you are among those who shared your outrage over the 8 Senate Democrats who cut a deal with Republicans to reopen the government.
The outrage certainly has its merits. I also disagree with the way these Senate Democrats handled the deal. But I have a more nuanced big picture take on how this will ultimately impact the broader political landscape. If you stick with me here, I’ll explain.
So, what’s in the deal? It falls short in key ways. While the deal funds the government until January 30, funds SNAP, reverses Russell Vought’s layoffs during the shutdown, and guarantees backpay for federal workers, it does not renew the Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies - which was the foundational ask Democrats had during this shutdown.
The deal does provide a Senate vote on renewing the subsidies by the second week of December and lets Democrats write the bill, but it does not guarantee it will pass, nor does it guarantee a vote in the House. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) has already indicated he will not commit to a vote on ACA subsidies in the House.
This is why the vast majority of Democratic lawmakers wanted to force the ACA subsidies into a CR to reopen the government. That would’ve done more to force Speaker Johnson’s hand.
This is the core reason Democrats are facing backlash. People feel they’re ceding all their leverage by reopening, and leaving the renewal of ACA subsidies to chance and the whim of Republicans.
Make no mistake, my analysis isn’t discounting the outrage of the Democratic base. In fact, I agree. I think Senate Democrats’ shutdown deal was a strategic mistake. Democrats had momentum after their 2025 election wins, polls increasingly showed Republicans being blamed for the shutdown, and I think the courts were on the verge of definitively forcing Trump to fund SNAP. I think Democrats could’ve held off a little longer to try and get closer to a concrete ACA subsidy concession. But these 8 Democrats didn’t do that.
In their telling, these Senate Dems felt they couldn’t move Republicans, who had a far higher tolerance for causing pain (SNAP freeze, layoffs, etc). People were struggling, and they were hearing this from their constituents. Also, the prospect of the filibuster being nuked likely weighed on their calculations. So they yielded. Nonetheless, it’s clear that the most active members of the Democratic base disagree with the deal.
Of course, the way this shutdown deal was constructed will surely have a major impact on internal Democratic dynamics and leadership fights. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is not coming out of this unscathed.
But analyzing the bigger picture post-shutdown landscape, the political fundamentals have not changed since last week’s elections. I do think it’s clear that Democrats overall are still leaving this shutdown in a better place than when they entered it.
When Democrats entered this shutdown, the dominating media narrative was one of Trump dominance and Democratic unpopularity - in spite of countless polls highlighting Trump’s political weakness. Throughout this shutdown, Democrats showed some real fight and have successfully made it clear to the broader public that renewing the ACA subsidies is central to their party identity. This is a policy that consistently gets between 70% and 80% support in polls.
Meanwhile, Trump and Republicans showcased a callous, out-of-touch cruelty. From their inexcusable refusal to fully fund SNAP benefits to their public opposition to renewing the ACA subsidies, Republicans exposed themselves even further. While federal workers were not getting paychecks and nearly 42 million Americans were set to go hungry, Trump was focused on demolishing the East Wing, renovating the White House, and throwing a Great Gatsby-themed party at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump’s approval ratings continued to tank during the shutdown, hitting below 40% in multiple polls as he remains underwater on all key issues. We then saw multiple generic ballot polls showing Democrats 8 and 9 points ahead.
Then we came to last week, where it became indisputable that Donald Trump is a politically weak, lame-duck president whose extremism and unpopularity weighed down ballot Republicans into massive 2025 losses with bigger swings to the left than in 2017.
Across Virginia, New Jersey, New York City, Georgia, California, and Mississippi, Democrats posted sweeping victories driven by double-digit swings among women, Latinos, young voters, and suburban constituencies. Republicans evaporated the gains they made with those demographics in 2024. These weren’t isolated blue-state quirks - these were structural political shifts that mirror and surpass the bellwether patterns we saw ahead of the 2018 midterms.
As we move through this week, after this shutdown deal, those political shifts will very likely remain unchanged: President Trump still owns the affordability crisis, and his authoritarian overreach remains incredibly unpopular.
I do think political news junkies and Democratic activists will certainly hold Democratic leadership accountable for how this shutdown ended. But will the Americans who don’t tune into the daily machinations of Capitol Hill see this in the same way? Or will Democrats have been seen as trying to fight for their healthcare using the shutdown leverage they had, while Republicans used hunger as their leverage? Will the images of the destruction of the East Wing reverberate more forcefully in the American psyche than Senate Democratic capitulation?
We’ll see.
But ultimately, I think the most consequential fight is still ahead, with the December vote on the ACA subsidies approaching.
And we have to be clear: If the ACA subsidies aren’t renewed, it will be the fault of the Republicans who blocked them, and they will have to deal with the ramifications in the midterms.
There will also be a thousand other scandals and incidents of Trump Administration overreach to contend with between now and November 2026. So, while yes, this shutdown deal was a mistake, it’s clear to me that the Democratic Party is still in a significantly better position than the Republican Party heading into 2026.
