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Notes -
Nate Silver breaks with the center-left and says that the Senate Democrats should have shut down the government. The full thing is worth reading, but the main two points in favor of it are that the Republicans have more to lose than the Democrats and that the Democrats campaigning on being the "responsible party" and "steward of government" failed (albeit partly due to their own faults, he immediately adds), so they may as well try a different strategy. (Silver has been advocating the Democrats take more risks since at least as far back as the Biden-Harris swap, based on the logic that a high-variance strategy is better, when you're at a disadvantage.)
I mean tge problems with the strategy are obvious. First, as @anti_dan mentioned, we’ve been chopping entire programs without incident for months now. A shutdown is what the GOP wants. First because it gives them a fig leaf to go farther and faster in DOGE-ing the government, but because it also quite often undermines their basic premise of governance— that government programs and government regulations make the country better. Hard to make the Bernie arguments when you’ve shut down the government. You also have the problem of government workers on Facebook and Twitter and TikTok making utter fools of themselves crying about having to prove that they’ve done anything remotely productive in the last week (I find the videos hilarious because these people are out of touch). Of course the democrats had just won a court battle to force the government to rehire people laid off.
Second, this isn’t even a message. It’s just an impotent temper tantrum, and that’s how it will look. “I want you to stop cutting government programs, so I’ll shut down the whole thing. Mo-ooom! The republicans are being meanies and won’t let me keep programs that don’t do anything!” It’s not a message that would make anyone vote for them. What they need to do is come up with an agenda. A serious agenda. And no, “we hate Trump” is not even the start of an agenda. But that’s been the message of the democrats for decades. Every republican is a fascist bent on destroying Our Democracy and you better vote for me because I’m a democrat and I’ll stop them. Theres no positive reason to vote for them. They can’t articulate their agenda beyond “vote blue no matter who because Our Democracy.” Which doesn’t have a message about fixing literally anything that’s broken. They have no plan to fight inflation, to make housing affordable, to fix health care, or fix college. They have a plan to … hate republicans and stop republicans. The republicans have a message: government is tge problem, and if we make it smaller, your stuff won’t cost as much.
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