Parties hope to make shutdown blame stick

In the wake of a U.S. government shutdown that began after midnight Tuesday evening, Republican and Democratic party leaders in Washington have launched a marathon of interviews, TV appearances, and news conferences.

Both sides hope the media blitz will convince voters of the real reason for the shutdown, even while the two parties offer sharply contrasting answers to that question. Republicans have cast the shutdown as an effort by Democrats to fund public health services for illegal immigrants. Democrats hope voters will view the shutdown as a refusal by Republicans to pay for healthcare. Although each party is banking that public perception will go its way, some experts believe that controlling the narrative will be harder—and perhaps less advantageous—than with shutdowns of the past.

“There’s more of an opportunity for the nuance to come out just because of the different alternative news sources that people can get. There’s going to be the opportunity to spin whatever narrative [one] wants to spin,” said Jared Pincin, an associate professor of economics at Cedarville University.

Meanwhile, with lawmakers repeatedly failing to pass a short-term spending extension, it’s unclear how long the shutdown will last and what its path to resolution may be.

The past two shutdowns have been brought on by Republican demands. In 2018, Republicans forced a 43-day shutdown when, at the request of the Trump administration, lawmakers pressed for increased funding for President Donald Trump’s border wall. Before that, a 2013 shutdown went on for 16 days while Republicans refused to pass the Affordable Care Act.

This time, it’s Democrats making the demands.

Coming into Tuesday evening, Democrats have made general demands that Republicans backtrack on much of Trump’s Medicaid reforms included in his One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

More tangibly, Democrats have also pressed for the continuation of a COVID-era emergency funding program. In 2021, Congress temporarily expanded the qualifying criteria of the Affordable Care Act’s premium tax credits, allowing a wider pool of applicants to receive federal subsidies to pay for health insurance during the pandemic. Those emergency provisions expire at the end of 2025, but Democrats have called on Congress to make the expansion permanent.

When Republicans failed to meet those demands on Tuesday, Democrats helped defeat a short-term spending expansion that would have kept the government open through Nov. 21. That bill failed in a 55-45 vote.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., called the opposition to the bill needlessly partisan.

“Here’s the simple fact. There isn’t anything we can do to make this bill any better for them,” Johnson said after Democrats defeated the spending extension. “We did not put one single partisan provision in the bill. There are no policy riders, no gimmicks, no tricks. There’s nothing we can pull out of this bill to make it leaner or cleaner than it is.”

Republicans will need the support of at least seven Democrats to reopen the government and pass some form of spending legislation. On Tuesday, two Democrats voted with Republicans in support of the short-term extension: John Fetterman, D-Pa., and Cortez Masto, D-N.V. One independent, Angus King, I-Maine, also voted for the measure.

Democrats for their part confidently believe Republicans will shoulder the blame of the shutdown amid united Republican control. I asked House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., why voters would see it that way.

“Donald Trump is president. He is a Republican president,” Jeffries said. “Republicans have a majority in the House and Republicans have a majority in the Senate. We as Democrats have been very clear that we will support bipartisan spending legislation that meets the needs of the American people.”

But while the shutdown consumes focus in D.C., its repercussions might not be felt so strongly elsewhere in the country, reducing the effectiveness of the political moment Democrats hope to score.

Pincin, the professor from Cedarville, believes the blame game might go over voters’ heads.

“This is not an economic question but sort of a political one. You’ve got a governor’s race going on in Virginia, and it’s relatively close,” Pincin said, referring to the state’s upcoming election in November. “If you have a shutdown where it actually leads to layoffs in northern Virginia, I mean that’s very clearly going to make an impact. For most people, they go, ‘Oh, it’s another thing that’s happening in D.C.,’ even though that’s not necessarily the case.”

“The reality is that for the average American, I don’t think they feel short-term shutdowns at all,” Pincin added.

It’s unclear when the Senate will hold its next votes on spending legislation. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., put the bill on the floor again on Wednesday, but that effort also failed. He has not announced when lawmakers will return to Washington, D.C.