“What the f*** are you doing?! Chuck Schumer is a human flat tire.” The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart vented on Monday, after playing a clip of the Senate Minority Leader at a press conference about the government shutdown, telling a lame joke.
Piling on Schumer is commonplace among Democrats and progressives who long for fresh faces and perennially lament the fighting skills of the party’s leaders. Schumer is old, his social media is weak, and his thinking is obsolete.
Now, the 74-year-old dared to say about the health policy organization formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, “New data came out today from KFF, and that is not Kentucky Fried French Fries.” To the guillotine!
I have not been a reflexive defender of Schumer this year. Just last month, I criticized Schumer’s initial approach to the shutdown, and I thought he was completely off-base criticizing diplomatic talks with Iran.
But since the shutdown began, what is there to complain about besides bad nightclub material?
Schumer has kept his Senate Democrats in line. While three broke ranks on the initial vote on the Republican stopgap bill to fund the government, that’s four short of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster. Schumer hasn’t bled any more since.
Democratic messaging has been consistent and straightforward. As Schumer said on the Senate floor on Wednesday: “The government is shut down for one reason and one reason only: Donald Trump and the Republicans would rather kick 15 million people off health insurance and raise premiums by thousands and thousands of dollars a year on tens of millions of Americans, rather than sit down and work with Democrats on fixing healthcare.”
And there is no evidence Democrats are suffering with the public. A poll from The Economist/YouGov sampled between October 4 and 6 found a plurality of 41 percent of American adults primarily blame Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress for the shutdown, versus 30 percent for the Democrats. Another YouGov poll conducted for CBS News a few days prior reported 39 percent blaming Trump and Republicans compared to 30 percent for congressional Democrats.
The most important poll number to watch is the congressional generic ballot test, which asks which party’s candidate you plan to support in the next House election. Two such polls have been taken since the shutdown, with Democrats leading by five points in one survey and three in the other. That’s a tick better than the average Democratic lead before the shutdown. So long as Democrats hold steady in the generic ballot, Schumer, as well as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, will likely be able to keep their members in line.
Schumer has received immense, unsolicited help from President Donald Trump, who had the opportunity to pin all blame on Democrats for instigating a shutdown by making an unrelated demand about health care subsidies. But you can’t blame someone for a shutdown if you say the shutdown is good. “A lot of good can come down from shutdowns,” said Trump ahead of the funding deadline, “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want.” He followed that with threats to lay off thousands of civil servants. Trump takes more of the blame because he has not just cheered the burning down of the government, but also gleefully proposed pouring more gasoline on the fire.
I don’t love Schumer’s approach of demanding health care concessions because it lacks an endgame. Last month, I summed up the usual trajectory of the shutdown gambit: “Once public opinion quickly turns, the shutdown agitators invariably realize the shutdown failed to provide negotiating leverage and eventually cave.” This shutdown is playing out differently. Democrats aren’t losing public opinion and have no incentive to cave. However, we have no reason to believe that Trump cares about public opinion—or reopening the government. Perhaps the only thing that could make Trump budge is a realization that renewing the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies before they expire would help Republicans in the midterms.
Nevertheless, Trump and the Republican majority do not need the Democrats to reopen the government. As both Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (!) and I have observed, Republicans can suspend or eliminate the filibuster. That would allow funding bills to clear Congress on party-line votes. So, I still have difficulty seeing Democrats gaining sufficient negotiating leverage to extract concessions. At the very least, they are not losing any leverage or suffering damage to public opinion as they communicate their core principles and agenda priorities.
Is the corny, clumsy Chuck Schumer the best face of the Democratic Party? No. But it’s always been a fallacy that any congressional leader, majority or minority, is their party’s face. The congressional leader’s job is to pass good legislation and stop the bad. That mainly involves behind-the-scenes organizing party caucuses, not being a pretty face, and producing shareable social media content.
Kvetching about Democratic incompetence is as familiar as kvetching about the New York Mets choking. But one clunker of a joke doesn’t mean Democrats are mishandling the shutdown showdown. So far, they’ve performed better than any opposition party in the history of shutdown showdowns.
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