The Democratic Base Is Very Happy With Their Members In Congress — For Once

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are going without pay; millions of Americans who depend on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for food are set to miss payments starting this weekend; and air-traffic staffing shortages are causing groundstops across the country.

Congressional Democrats are under real pressure to cave — and they aren’t. And that’s genuinely surprising the progressives that pushed Democrats to leverage the government funding fight over expiring health care subsidies in the first place.

“We’ve heard a lot from Democrats saying that we are in unprecedented times, right? And then that our democracy is at stake,” Britt Jacovich, the deputy communications director at MoveOn, told NOTUS. “This feels like Democrats actually acting like it, acting like our institutions are on fire, acting like people’s lives are on the line.”

Jacovich said she’s impressed that Democrats are “continuing to show that we can’t send strongly worded letters and expect Trump to listen.”

“I think that era of politics is long gone,” she continued. “Democrats understand that right now. It’s definitely a welcomed shift.”

Grassroots groups were livid when enough Senate Democrats, led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, helped Republicans fund the government back in March. At the time, Schumer said entering a shutdown would be far worse for Democrats, and give President Donald Trump the power to essentially dismantle the federal government.

A month into the shutdown, after Democrats decided they would use this funding fight as leverage, Trump has attempted to overhaul the federal bureaucracy, laying off thousands of employees — but grassroots leaders say now is not the time to cave. With no guarantees from Republicans that Congress will address Democrats’ concerns, like looming health care costs and guarantees Trump won’t try to circumvent Congress’ power of the purse, they argue there’s no reason for lawmakers to turn the lights back on.

“Passing a short-term CR without any guarantee … just empowers the agenda that they (Republicans) are trying to enforce in the first place,” said Sydney Register, the national press secretary for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “Democrats cannot cave right now.”

Andrew O’Neill, the national advocacy director at the progressive group Indivisible, told NOTUS that his organization’s base is happy with Democratic lawmakers who are holding firm. O’Neill said that in the past, Democrats have typically tried to find an off-ramp, but Indivisible hopes that’s not how this shutdown ends.

“We hear from our grassroots groups across the country that they believe that this moment demands significant steel and fight from congressional Democrats,” O’Neill said. “This is really one of the first big fights that congressional Democrats have taken on that is really maximizing leverage points that they have. There’ve been some other moments along the way, but this is more like, everyone’s in on this together.”

Some Democrats on Capitol Hill admit that weighing the cost of extending the shutdown with what they are fighting for is getting increasingly difficult.

“It is a tough balance,” Rep. Shontel Brown told NOTUS. “I have been able to go to a couple of airports on the ground. What I found from the rank-and-file TSA folks, some of the folks who come to my office, is that they understand — they recognize that this is a matter of … access to affordable health care, and that has been the focus from the very beginning.”

“I don’t think this is one where we have to try to decide between winners or losers.
It’s an issue of where we have to make sure that we’re doing the best for all of our constituents,” she continued.

Rep. Gil Cisneros told NOTUS he still thinks this is a fight they should have had back in March.

“All these things that we’re talking about now, we should have been talking about then. Instead of just giving Republicans the CR, which then let them do their big, ugly bill, which now put us in a situation where we’re in a health care crisis,” Cisneros said.

Rep. Jamie Raskin said simply: “The watchword for these tough days is solidarity. We don’t want people who are dependent on the Affordable Care Act or Medicaid to be pit against federal workers, to be pit against people who need SNAP benefits in nutrition and food.”

“We’re hanging tough,” Raskin added.

Democrats acknowledge that sticking together will get harder as the shutdown drags on and the pain it leads to becomes more acute.

The unity Democrats will need moving forward is still a relatively new feeling for them. No one really wants to talk about how tenuous it may be.

“Feels better this time for sure,” Rep. Becca Balint told NOTUS, comparing the current climate to the one in the spring. But she was also weary: “We do feel like we have solid partners on the Senate side, but we also know a tweet could change anything.”

The shutdown has happened in the middle of a very public debate over how Democrats should present themselves to voters after the humiliation they experienced in 2024. While much of the conversation has focused on how Democrats handled identity politics and social issues, one group of Biden administration staff put out a detailed self-examination of their time in office that said, essentially, Democrats too often let caution dictate their approach.

“One thing we took away from the report is that you have to do things that are able to break through, even to low-information voters,” said Douglas Farrar, a Biden-era Federal Trade Commission official who participated in the report. “It seems to me that the Democratic bet is that when people see their health care costs rise on Nov. 1, they’ll be looking around for someone to blame.”

On the first day of the shutdown, a coalition of progressive groups, economic and health care policy groups and elected Democrats gathered outside the Capitol to celebrate. The “Health Care Over Billionaires” rally served as both the message of the shutdown, as well as its political promise: Democrats and their allies working together, instead of yelling at each other as they had in March.

“There was a fervor. There was a, ‘We are not backing down.’ That was just great to hear,” David Kass, the executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, recalled of the rally. The coalition has held, and Kass said its moment is finally arriving. The administration’s declaration that SNAP benefits will go unpaid coupled with the start of the open-enrollment window for the Affordable Care Act is “going to put a lot more pressure on Republicans,” he said.

Democrats have no choice but to stay the course now, he said: “Staying on message and continuing to push is the best thing that can be done.”

What if Democrats can’t do it? “I’m hoping that that’s not something that we need to deal with, because we’re going to win,” Kass said.