On Nov. 3, Democrats rolled over Republicans in off-year elections across the country. But their celebration did not even last a week. Five days later, the party’s unity in the government shutdown battle evaporated as eight senators defected to Republicans in reopening the government. The agreement did not include the provision that Democrats had coalesced around — restoring subsidies for Obamacare recipients. Instead, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., made a verbal promise to hold a separate vote. After weeks of polling had shown that Democrats appeared to be winning the messaging war, the deal was a gut punch to Democratic voters.
It showcased the same old pattern: Democratic voters want fighters, but their leaders keep flinching.
Rick Wilson, president of the pro-democracy Lincoln Project, was disgusted. “The Hateful Eight Democrats made the worst political calculation this year out of fear, a misguided sense of purpose, and an absolutely horrible understanding of political strategy,” he said. “They showed the world that Democrats cannot stay united even when winning.”
Just over a week after the deal was announced, it’s still unclear what exactly motivated the “Hateful Eight” Senate Democrats to align with their GOP counterparts.
One theory is that Democratic leaders are attempting to play a long political game — one in which rising health insurance costs and the pain of the shutdown become weapons the party can use against Republicans in the 2026 midterms and beyond. But given how often Democrats have been outmaneuvered by President Donald Trump and Republicans, such as in July with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, this argument is unconvincing.
The eight senators may simply have acted out of craven self-interest. Two are retiring, while the rest are not up for reelection in 2026. Together, Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen and Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine received nearly $2 million from health PACs during the last election cycle. Meanwhile, the airline industry was losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day during the shutdown due to cancellations and staffing shortages. Since 2019, according to the Lever, at least $842,500 in donations from airlines went to seven of the eight senators, including $218,000 to Rosen.
There is also the theory that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and other Democratic leaders were afraid that Republicans would follow Trump’s commands to end the filibuster. This would take away one of the few ways that Democrats, as the minority party, have of slowing down and potentially stopping Trump’s authoritarian agenda.
Some have suggested that the eight collaborators were just doing what many other moderate Democrats wanted but were afraid to do. Under this scenario, the eight made the politically volatile decision to vote with the Republicans to reopen the government were “sacrificed” because they are relatively safe. None of them have to navigate a reelection campaign in next year’s midterms.
“This was all textbook low-dominance politics — hesitant, bloodless, and self-defeating,” explained political scientist M. Steven Fish, the author of “Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy’s Edge.”
Fish is blunt about the glaring problem and explanation for why the Democrats are so good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: “Unfortunately, the leadership of the Democratic Party is an obstacle.”
Many Democratic leaders are continuing to operate according to old norms of collegiality, as well as the old assumption that broad areas of agreement exist for compromising with Republicans, when in reality, today’s GOP is an extremist organization that has no use for political traditions.
Many Democratic leaders are continuing to operate according to old norms of collegiality, as well as the old assumption that broad areas of agreement exist for compromising with Republicans, when in reality, today’s GOP is an extremist organization that has no use for political traditions. Then there is the generation gap between party elders, particularly Schumer, and up-and-coming leaders such as New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who want a more vibrant, progressive and less risk-averse party that will really fight for the concerns of working people instead of defaulting to corporate interests and stale centrism.
The simplest explanation for appeasing Republicans may be realpolitik and the desire to stop the pain the shutdown inflicted on the American people.
“Democratic leaders had a real challenge of coalition management,” Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America and author of “Doom Loop,” told me. “It was not clear they were going to get anything more out of withholding the votes longer, and I think it was reasonable to think: we’ve made our point about healthcare and SNAP benefits, we have a bunch of Epstein documents ready to dump, so let’s just move on.”
Many Democratic senators, he suggested, lacked the “pain threshold” for causing “more harm to vulnerable people.”
Whatever the explanation, journalist Adam Serwer’s insight remains true: “American politics makes a lot more sense when you realize that the GOP is afraid of pissing off the GOP base, and the Dems are afraid of pissing off the GOP base, but neither party is afraid of pissing off the Dem base.”
Ultimately, in the Age of Trump and America’s collapsing democracy, these eight senators — and the Democrats who think like them — are proving themselves obsolete and, in the process, endangering the party itself. Their assumptions about shared democratic values and institutional guardrails no longer apply.
“There’s no going ‘back to normal,’” Wilson said. “[Democrats] are stuck in a time warp and don’t have the guts to play the harder edge game they need to if they want to stop Trump and MAGA minions from destroying the government and the economy.”
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Proving Wilson’s point, Sen. Tim Kaine told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that Democrats “had no path, none, to a health care fix until we reopened government.” With the shutdown over and Thune’s promise of a vote on ACA subsidies, Kaine said, “Now we have a path, not a guarantee, but we at least have a path.”
Kaine called it “malpractice” for House Republicans to block the subsidies. “If they don’t take it up, I’ll give you a prediction: The November 2026 elections are going to look a whole lot worse for Republicans than the November 2025 elections did.”
But there’s a problem with this calculation. Kaine is assuming that Trump and congressional Republicans actually care if they are hurting the American people. It’s unclear whether Kaine genuinely believes this, or if he is simply voicing one of the dozens of hopeful fictions Democrats often tell themselves.
What is obvious is that the Democrats’ surrender in the shutdown battle embodies a many years-long pattern of behavior where the party and its leaders insist on being “the adults in the room” when confronted by an abusive and dangerous Republican Party.
This is not healthy behavior. It is learned helplessness disguised as some type of maturity.
Democrats who have a strong moral conscience and care deeply about democracy and the rule of law are justifiably angry at Trumpists and the MAGA movement. But many increasingly blame their own leaders who do not stand up for Democratic principles.
By contrast, the “practical” Democrats fold. They give up what they know is right for something that can merely pass. These politicians will compromise what they know to be right to get a “workable result.” In the end, even while they are branded as more mature and practical, Democrats like these are far more likely to surrender to bullying by Trump and Republicans. And surrendering to bullies has rarely, if ever, ended well.
Democrats need to embrace a high-dominance leadership style if they want any real chance of stopping the Trump administration’s authoritarian onslaught. Part of the president’s core appeal and brand is that he doesn’t back down. Trump is a political warrior for MAGA –– and most importantly, himself. Even when he is losing by most conventional measures, he keeps fighting and throwing political punches.
Democratic voters are desperate for fighters. This, at least in part, explains Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory in New York City’s mayoral race, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s rise in popularity for the 2028 presidential election.
Americans love a winner and hate a loser. Unless they break the habit of learned helplessness and change leadership, Democrats are sure to keep losing.
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