With a government shutdown less than a week away, both parties seem convinced the other party is going to take the bulk of the blame when it happens. That dynamic almost certainly means it's going to happen.
The Washington Post has a story up today in which Democrats vow not to blink this time around.
Democratic leaders in the House and Senate are holding firm to their vow to oppose a relatively straightforward measure to extend government funding past Sept. 30 unless Republicans agree to negotiate on health care...
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) endured heavy criticism from Democrats in and out of Washington after voting in March against blocking a previous Republican funding bill. He pledged that Democrats would be more prepared ahead of the next funding deadline — a rare moment of leverage for Democratic senators because Republicans need their votes to prevent a shutdown.
The story does acknowledge that it's usually the party out of power that gets blamed for these things, but Democrats are confident this time will be different.
Republicans argue Democrats will be blamed for the shutdown because they’re the ones demanding something in exchange for their votes. But Schumer and other Democrats have cited polling showing that more Americans would blame Trump and Republicans for a shutdown than would blame Democrats.
“Who wins in a shutdown? Traditionally, it would be the party in the White House,” said Jim Kessler, a former Schumer aide who is now executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank. “But Donald Trump has been so eager for a showdown and a fight that the old rules of blame may not apply.”
I'm not sure what polling they are relying on but there is a poll out today saying that Republicans will get blamed no matter how the question is framed.
In our polling, voters say they’ll blame Republicans more than Democrats for a government shutdown. But, nuance: while 52% of adults support Democrats withholding votes for a funding bill until Republicans restore federal health care spending, most still don't _want_ a shutdown. pic.twitter.com/beBSkoxQN3
— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) September 26, 2025
Note the big caveat here. A plurality prefers passing a clean CR.
...despite their support for the Democrats’ voting against a funding bill as a way to signal support for health care, few adults want the government to actually close. A plurality of the public favors both parties passing a short-term continuing resolution to keep the government open at current funding levels (37%) while they debate a longer-term solution. If that’s not possible, fewer voters want a clean bill without changes (21%) vs withholding votes until funding is restored (26%).
This result doesn't make a lot of sense. Republicans in the House have already passed a clean CR and left town. The won't be back until after the deadline for the shutdown. Republicans in the Senate have raised and attempted to pass the same bill but were filibustered by Democrats. So the bottom line here is that Republicans are attempting to pass a clean CR and Democrats are the ones blocking it. How doing so could result in blaming the GOP for a shutdown isn't clear apart from sheer partisan hypocrisy, i.e. Trump is always wrong no matter what.
Meanwhile, the White House clearly isn't putting much stock in that poll (or whatever Democrats are looking at). An unnamed White House official said their plan was to punish Dems for this.
“We’re going to extract maximum pain,” said the official, granted anonymity to discuss political strategy, adding that Democrats “will pay a huge price for this.”...
“Historically, it’s the aggressor that always loses,” the senior White House official said. “And quite simply, their constituencies and their priorities are all going to get chewed up, and ours, not so much.”...
Administration officials believe that once a potential shutdown starts, Democrats won’t be able to hold out “very long” and that GOP allies on the Hill are aligned. They “are strapped in for a fight. They’re gonna make them vote five-plus times,” the senior official said...
“We’re bracing for impact,” the White House official said.
This makes a lot of sense to me. Republicans can force Senate Democrats to vote against a clean CR every day of the shutdown, making it very clear who is responsible. And Dems are already on the record saying they have no real hope of a win here. There's no real exit strategy, almost as if they never expected this to accomplish anything.
And that, frankly, is what makes me nervous.
As I described in some detail here, I think the Trump administration does have a potential weakness here that Democrats may be trying to exploit and it doesn't have anything to do with health care issues. Democrats were hesitant to go all in on a shutdown back in March because they were fairly confident that Trump's tariffs were going to lead to an economic downturn. If we were on the cusp of that, they didn't want a government shutdown to confuse people about who was responsible for that downturn in the economy. In other words, they wanted to be able to blame Trump and for Trump to have no way to point the finger back at them.
But as Ezra Klein pointed out, one of the key things that hand changed was that the expected downturn hadn't happened.
Trump’s tariffs are unpopular, but what damage they have done to him politically they have already done or they will do over time, as price increases squeeze Americans. We are not in a recession. The economy is not in chaos. Democrats cannot stand back and hope the markets will do their work for them.
There are at least two ways to read this. One is that there was no downturn so there's no further reason to avoid a government shutdown. The other is that pushing us into a shutdown now is potentially a nudge that could create the downturn Democrats wanted all along.
The possibility of damaging the economy has been front an center in every past shutdown. And at this moment it would certainly help explain why Democrats are willing to go forward with this despite having not much hope for success in the short term. If the shutdown weakens the economy just enough that they can blame the downturn on Trump's tariffs, that would be a big advantage for them heading into the midterms and beyond. It's risky and very irresponsible but at this point they may feel they have to take the risk because a) their base is demanding they fight and b) things aren't trending in their direction as they'd hoped.
All that to say, the Trump administration can certainly blame the coming shutdown on Dems and force them to own it for a few days, but they shouldn't let it linger in ways that could seriously hurt the markets, consumer confidence, unemployment figures, etc. Democrats may be willing to harm the country to prove they were right about Trump harming the country, but the president shouldn't let them get away with it.
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