Photograph Source: Rhododendrites – CC BY-SA 4.0

You cannot eat words. Rhetoric does not pay medical bills. Face it—the Democrats didn’t just lose the shutdown fight; they were crushed. And the brutal truth is they were never going to win, because they walked into a political gunfight armed with talking points and wishful thinking.

The Democrats shut down the government to claw back the subsidies needed to keep the individual mandate afloat under Obamacare. Those subsidies vanished when Trump’s “big beautiful” bill passed in July, completing the GOP’s 15-year crusade to gut the Affordable Care Act. Democrats lost that vote fair and square under reconciliation rules, yet somehow convinced themselves that a shutdown would scare Republicans into reversing a victory they had spent years pursuing. They forgot the most obvious fact in American politics: Trump doesn’t care about governing, institutions, or working people, and he certainly wasn’t going to rescue Obamacare for them.

Worse, Democrats entered the shutdown with no exit strategy—not even a bad one. They didn’t get the subsidies back. They didn’t even get a real commitment. What they got was a vague promise of a future vote, which is Washington-speak for “you will get nothing and like it.”

The subsidies are gone, and Democrats walk away with no policy win to show their voters. What they gained, if anything, was rhetorical—a flashy press conference here, a few outraged tweets there—and maybe the hope that in 2026 voters will remember higher premiums and tie them to Trump and the GOP. But that hope depends on Democrats being able to communicate clearly and relentlessly, and recent history suggests that messaging is not their superpower. Their opponents punch; Democrats write op-eds about getting punched.

The problem goes far deeper than mishandling shutdown politics. It reflects a party adrift, unsure what it stands for, and unwilling to confront the consequences of decades of neo-liberal policy drift. Clinton embraced free trade and helped accelerate deindustrialization. Obama bailed out Wall Street and left Main Street begging for relief. Biden insisted the economy was fine in 2024 while working-class Americans felt the ground collapsing beneath them.

The seeds of this failure were planted long ago in the Democratic Party’s slow but deliberate abandonment of the working class. By 2024, voters were so disillusioned that they rejected the Democrats even though they disliked Trump. The Harris–Walz ticket was a symptom of the party’s weakness, not the cause. You cannot claim to fight for ordinary people when you haven’t listened to them for a generation.

Since Trump returned to office, Democrats have been stumbling around in the dark. The shutdown was supposed to be their bold stand, their statement of purpose, the first spark of a comeback. Instead, it exposed them as a party that has nothing left to run on but “Trump is bad”—a message that failed in 2016 and 2024. Hope is not a strategy, and hating Trump is not a platform.

The moral of the story is simple: they lost. They lost the subsidies. They lost SNAP. They lost the policy war, and in politics, losing policies means losing people’s lives, livelihoods, and trust. But they can cling to one cold comfort: perhaps they won the rhetorical battle.

Except—you cannot eat words or pay the bills with rhetoric. Voters know that. Democrats should start acting like they do.

The post Why the Democrats Lost the Shutdown Battle appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed