It’s nice to be right.
My prediction from the beginning of the Democrats’ shutdown showdown was that their pathetic posturing would backfire on them.
And it appears it has.
A new CBS News and YouGov poll conducted after the shutdown ended shows that 55% of the country believes that President Donald Trump and Republicans “got more of what they wanted” from shutdown negotiations. Only 6% think the Democrats did.
That’s not surprising considering there really weren’t a ton of negotiations involved. From the beginning, Republicans wanted a simple piece of legislation to keep the government funded and open – and work out other policy debates later. The Democrats wouldn’t have it, however, and tried to force an extension of costly Obamacare subsidies.
That was never going to work, and eventually, a handful of Senate Democrats with some common sense reached an agreement with Republicans.
While the progressive members of the Democratic Party are angry that any congressional Democrats would dare to compromise, they owe their more reasonable colleagues a “thank you.”
The shutdown was already the country’s longest, and it was starting to have real-life consequences for many Americans, from cut-off food assistance to canceled flights.
A continued shuttered government would only have gotten uglier for citizens ‒ and Democrats.
Americans want their government to operate as it should
While the country seemed to put initial blame on congressional Republicans for getting the shutdown started, in the subsequent weeks, it became clear that voters were waking up to the reality that it was Democratic leaders who were responsible.
The CBS News/YouGov poll found that in the end, Americans blamed Democrats the most for how they handled the shutdown, with 60% disapproving. No one came out looking great, but Republicans and Trump had 54% and 56%, respectively, disapproving of how they handled things.
In the past two weeks, those disapproval numbers had held steady for Republicans (and even improved slightly) while Democrats were quickly losing public support – going from 55% who disapproved on Nov. 2 to 60% in the latest poll.
Was the shutdown just all performance art, anyway?
The seven Senate Democrats and one independent who finally sided with Republicans have made some telling comments about their decision to come around and reopen the government.
It’s worth noting that several of this faction deserve credit for their consistency all along about wanting to keep the government open. That includes Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who called the shutdown a “failure” and apologized to all the federal workers and Americans harmed by it.
Then there’s senators like Tim Kaine of Virginia, when asked if he wished he had looked for an off-ramp sooner, said this: “I was so focused on the Virginia elections, I wasn’t in this discussion on the health care to see how dug in they were.”
The elections were certainly a factor in the Democrats’ refusal to end the shutdown, as they thought they had to look “tough” for their voters. And Democratic candidates had a good night.
However, it’s hard to believe that Kaine and others didn’t know the Republicans were “dug in” from the beginning and that Democrats never had a shot at winning this fight.
As conservative author and journalist Salena Zito observed, Democrats who forced this shutdown put “politics before everything,” including the best interests of millions of Americans.
Come the 2026 midterm elections, voters shouldn’t forget it.
Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at ijacques@usatoday.com or on X: @Ingrid_Jacques
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