Brownstein: This shutdown may help Democrats, but not democracy

It’s easy to understand why Democrats want to use the government shutdown that began Wednesday to focus on the choices by President Donald Trump and the Republican Congress that will deny health insurance to millions of Americans.

It’s hard, however, to plausibly argue that those health care cuts are the most urgent threat facing the nation at a time when Trump is explicitly demanding that the Justice Department prosecute those he considers enemies, pressuring ABC to remove a late night TV host he dislikes, dispatching National Guard forces into blue cities, and preparing the military to fight “the enemy from within.”

Bottom-up backlash

Congressional Democrats, by centering their demands on restoring funding for Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, are deploying their strongest legislative weapon — the ability to shut down the government — behind what polls show is their strongest issue: health care. That may, in fact, be the approach that maximizes the party’s chances of winning back at least the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms.

But the Democratic strategy in this shutdown also suggests that if Trump’s offensive against bedrock constitutional safeguards is to be stopped, or even slowed, it will not be because of the opposition party. It will be because of the kind of decentralized, bottom-up backlash that convinced the Walt Disney Co. and ABC to restore Jimmy Kimmel after they initially capitulated.

By any conventional political calculation, health care is a tempting target for Democrats.

As a result of the Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the year-end expiration of the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced subsidies, about 16 million people will lose their health insurance, according to Congressional Budget Office projections. No previous statute has ever cost so many their coverage. About 20 million more people who buy coverage on the ACA exchanges would face higher premiums if the subsidies end.

Public and private polls, not surprisingly, have found that most Americans are not keen on those possibilities. Tony Fabrizio, a lead pollster for Trump’s 2024 campaign, has released surveys on cutting Medicaid to fund tax cuts and allowing the ACA subsidies to expire. Those polls show broad opposition among both Democrats and swing voters, and majority opposition even among Trump voters. What’s more, although the Democratic Party’s public image is at a low ebb, surveys consistently report that health care is one of the very few issues on which more people trust Democrats than Republicans.

For all these reasons, focusing the shutdown on health care advances the core message that Democrats want to drive: that Trump has failed to solve the affordability squeeze as he promised and instead has prioritized further enriching his wealthy friends. Around the world, most political parties opposing authoritarians have usually made the same choice, keeping their focus on kitchen-table issues.

But does it make sense to prioritize the price of eggs over democracy?

There is an undeniable opportunity cost in Democrats’ decision to focus the government shutdown — the party’s best chance this year to galvanize public attention — on health care. Unavoidably, that means choosing not to highlight Trump’s accelerating moves to suppress dissent, assail institutions he considers impediments, prosecute political adversaries and tilt the rules of elections in ways that favor his party.

Democrats are worrying about patching the safety net while Trump is shredding the Constitution.

I’ve criticized that emphasis, but maybe it’s unrealistic to expect Congressional Democrats to lead that fight. Trump’s assault on the rule of law is so sweeping that it doesn’t easily lend itself to concrete demands in a shutdown; there’s no enforceable way to ensure that, say, Attorney General Pam Bondi will not launch any more transparently vindictive prosecutions.

And there’s a better chance that at least some Republicans will be open to extending the ACA tax credits — or more broadly to defending Congress’ authority over spending — than resisting Trump’s moves to erase constitutional safeguards, which they have uniformly found ways to excuse.

Equally important, Congress is accustomed to dealing with quotidian questions of legislative compromise, not existential issues of democratic backsliding. Other leaders outside Washington — principally Democratic governors Gavin Newsom of California and JB Pritzker of Illinois — have been much more effective at explaining the gravity of Trump’s actions. And it may not be elected politicians at all who prove the most important actors in this struggle.

Civil society’s failures

For all the failures of Congressional Democrats, even more consequential has been the failure of the major institutions of civil society — leaders in business, education, philanthropy, the media, local government — to unite in a concerted defense of the nation’s basic democratic principles. Ordinary citizens have stirred, with marches (such as the No Kings rallies) and consumer boycotts (such as the one quickly organized against Disney).

But too many major institutions have chosen to cut their own deals or just stay mum. When former FBI director James Comey was indicted last week, after explicit public pressure on Bondi from Trump, there was shockingly little outcry from civic institutions or business leaders about what it means for the Justice Department to appear guided by the infamous maxim from Stalin’s secret police chief: “Give me the man and I will find the crime.”

“If Democrats are out there on their own, they may retreat to their strongest poll-tested messages,” said Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College political scientist who studies threats to democracy. “If civil society is in an uproar, and protesters are in the street, Democrats may be more willing to stand and fight on democracy-related grounds.”

Congressional Democrats often argue that their greatest leverage to stop Trump’s assault on rights and liberties would be to win back the House majority in 2026, and their best chance to do that is to stress tangible lunch-bucket issues such as health care.

But, even if that’s right (and there are arguments for why preserving democracy might prove more potent electorally in 2026 than it did in 2024), many students of democracy worry that the reluctance to fight now is emboldening Trump to shatter restraints in ways that will be very difficult to repair later.

Whatever the ultimate merits of those competing approaches, this showdown shows again that Congressional Democrats have chosen their principal battlefield against Trump-and that it is not preserving democracy. That means only Americans themselves can do that, by locking arms — across partisan, economic, and geographic lines — to defend fundamental democratic principles and condemn abuses of power.

Whether such a broad-based movement coalesces will determine what American democracy looks like at the end of Trump’s term far more than the choices Congressional Democrats make, as this shutdown will surely demonstrate.

Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. ©2025 Bloomberg. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.