This time it will/won't be different

Pre-register your shutdown predictions so you don't spin yourself silly next month

Dear Friends,

I take no pleasure in saying this, but I will now be surprised if the federal government doesn’t have a lapse in appropriations on Wednesday at 12:01am and begin the process of an orderly shutdown of non-excepted functions following that.¹ In fact, I think the current betting market odds for a shutdown ( 72% on Kalshi and 74% on Polymarket² as of 2:15pm on Monday, 9/29 when I’m writing this) are underrating the probability somewhat.

Very much feels like a BUY to me

The political logic of a shutdown happening Wednesday is pretty simple: the Democrats are having a coalitional fight, and even though shutdowns are political losers overall for the side causing them, minority leaders Schumer and Jeffries are now in a spot where a party fissure would be an even worse outcome, both for them personally and perhaps for the party. So they are choosing the least-worst option, in order to avoid an even worse outcome.

The Republicans, of course, are not about to swoop in and save their opponents from a bad choice. Unless they make unforced errors, they will win here. This is why it was necessary for Thune and Johnson and Trump to get the negotiating meeting back on the schedule for this afternoon, after Trump abruptly cancelled it last week. They need to feign good-faith negotiating.

But no one has much incentive for anything to come of this meeting. Because at this point, the incentive for all of the leaders is to have the shutdown.

But wait, you say! This time it will be different. Trump and his OMB director are dangerously out of control on the spending power (I agree) and congressional Republicans are holding up the extension of popular Obamacare subsidies (I agree) and the Supreme Court is backstopping radical theories of it all (I agree).

Therefore, the Democrats will win the public opinion battle and convince enough people that the GOP caused this shutdown and will either gain policy concessions or improve their political standing. (I disagree).

But hey, maybe I’m wrong!

This shutdown is an excellent opportunity for everyone to pre-register some predictions about how it is going to go. I’ll make ten such predictions here, divided into two groups: things that will operate very similarly to past shutdowns, and things that will be new for Shutdown 2025.^TM Grading me will not be an exact science—some of these are qualitative predictions—but we’ll circle back next month (or whenever this ends, gulp) and see how I did.

This time will not be different

Here are five predictions that fall in line with past shutdowns:

• Both parties will lose in public opinion, but Dems will lose more. Shutdowns are negative-sum deadweight-loss games, both on policy and politics. Past shutdowns have featured negative public reactions for both sides, but in the three major shutdowns have put more blame on the party trying to leverage the shutdown (GOP/Gingrich in 1995; GOP/Cruz in 2013; GOP/Trump in 2018). Right now, polling actually looks pretty good for the Democrats, relative to past shutdown instigators. Much hunch is it doesn’t last.

  That said, the hardening of partisan approval ratings may attenuate this compared to past shutdowns, but I still expect significant movement against Democrats on the margins, such as among independents. It is simply too easy to portray their actions as hostage-taking that shouldn’t be negotiated with, and public opinion has been very receptive to that message in the past. Short of Trump or the GOP making a series of unforced errors—not impossible, Trump originally cancelling the meeting and the OMB mass layoffs memo were both political errors, in my view—I expect them to win the politics.

• The Dems will not win anything beyond a face-saving concession when the government eventually reopens. The side trying to leverage a shutdown has never achieved anything close to its core-ask. The opposition simply demands that the government be reopened before it will begin to negotiate, and then points out all the ways that the shutdown is hurting federal workers, federal agencies, and American citizens. There is little reason to believe the GOP won’t adopt that tried-and-true playbook as a unified message next week, and no reason to believe it won’t work.

  Obviously, the Democrats will need some sort of window-dressing when they agree to reopen the government. Maybe it will be a handshake agreement to figure out the Obamacare subsidies at a future date, maybe it will be a deal to make a future good-faith effort to update the Impoundment Control Act to clarify the pocket-rescission clauses. But whatever it is, it will almost certainly be something that was already open to negotiation this fall anyway, and it definitely won’t be Trump signing a bill that statutorily limits his spending authority or stops any other alleged-lawlessness going on in the executive branch right now.

• The GOP will be far more unified than the Dems during the shutdown. This one is easy, because all of the structural forces are working against the Democrats on this one. They are the ones trying to leverage the shutdown, but it’s patently clear they don’t even agree with each other why they doing it. Is it ACA subsidies? Is it rescissions and impoundment? Is it tariffs? Is it energy policy from the big beautiful bill? Is it general Trump lawlessness? Ask five different Dems and get five different answers.

  The GOP has the advantage of a simple position—reopen the government and we can begin negotiations, full-stop—and also the advantage of the singular voice in the presidency. Congressional parties like the Dems are inherently have positions all over the map, message-discipline is more of a joke than a reality in Congress, and as Josh Huder wrote this morning, leaders in Congress aren’t even built for the articulation of policy in a national public opinion fight.

  Dems will also be more divided numerically. Right now, the Dems are almost perfectly unified on the substantive issues—ACA subsidies, pocket rescissions, other Trump spending aggrandizements—and even have some moderate Republicans on their side. Once there’s a shutdown, that is all going to flip, as the GOP will unify against the shutdown and the Dems will begin to lose moderates who tack a middle course and/or outright defect and want to reopen the government.

• The media focus will be on the shutdown, not the substance. One hope of every shutdown artist is that the attention the shutdown brings to politics will laser-focus on the substantive problem they are trying to accomplish by leveraging the shutdown. This was surely Ted Cruz’s dream with ACA repeal in 2013 and Trump’s vision of how the border wall would fit into the 2018-19 shutdown. But in both cases, media and public attention was far more focused on the question of when the government would reopen and what effect the government not being open was having on the country.

  And so it will go this year. Lots of Democrats are pushing an attention argument, from Ezra Klein to Faiz Shakir. That the Democrats can use a shutdown as as focusing event, to talk about Trump’s awful policies or just the Democratic alternative vision for the country. But it strikes me as mostly wishcasting. Any increased attention to politics next week will come from the marginal voters who are wondering why the hell the government is closed and when its going to reopen. That will crowd out almost all other public policy considerations.

  

  Air Traffic Controllers are a powerful player in shutdown politics

• If things drag on, civil servants will become players. Everyone tends to view shutdowns through the lens of bargaining politicians and public opinion, but those aren’t the only sources of influence. Federal employees who aren’t furloughed (“excepted” in the vernacular), especially street-level public-facing employees, have a lot of opportunities to influence events if they act collectively. In particular, TSA agents and air-traffic controllers more or less have the power to clog up the airports if they conduct wildcat strikes or sick-outs.

  This was arguably the single-biggest factor in ending the 2018-19 shutdown; just ten ATCs stayed home, and it crippled two major airports. I wouldn’t expect it to take 35 days for key civil servants to jump into action this time. The success of the direct action in 2019 surely turned some heads about the kind of influence they have. Last time, they missed two paychecks before doing anything. I doubt they let that happen again.

This time will be different

And here are four predictions that do not fall in line with past shutdowns:

• The filibuster shutdown will quickly create procedural pain for Senate Dems. There are lots of different configurations of shutdowns. There are four partisan configurations of the House, Senate, and presidency, each of which can occur with each party holding the presidency (RRR, RDR, DRR, DDR, RRD, RDD, DRD, DDD). In each of the divided government configurations you could have the player trying to leverage the shutdown be (1) the president; (2) an opposition chamber; (3) or a filibustering Senate minority. In the unified government scenario, you could have the president or a filibustering Senate minority.

  Each of these configurations is going to have its own politics. We’ve never had an extended shutdown leveraged by a filibustering opposition party in the Senate under unified government. (The brief January 2018 shutdown did fit this configuration, but didn’t last long enough to really exhibit any particular brand of politics.) I suspect that a shutdown by filibuster is going to cause significant pain for the Democrats. A unified government can create repeated cloture votes on demand that will position the Democrats to vote against opening the government as often as the GOP wants. We haven’t had that spectacle on the Senate floor during a shutdown before, and it’s going to be a problem for Dems.

• Trump will more aggressively use executive shutdown discretion. The president always has a lot of discretion as to which agencies are covered by the exemptions in the Anti-Deficiency Act and therefore do not have to close. Past presidents, including Trump, have used this discretion to politically aid their shutdown position. Presidents who oppose the shutdown (ex. Obama 2013) have closed popular, public-facing programs, while presidents who favored the shutdown (Trump 2018-19) kept similar program open.

  My bet is that Trump turns this to 11, and even becomes an innovator with the discretion. He might aggressively shutter agencies previously considered excepted; he might keep open large numbers of politically-friendly agencies that traditionally would have closed. He might even toy with getting rid of the Civiletti decision altogether and brining everyone back to work, trying to position himself as the hero for effectively ending the shut down. He’s also already talking about using the shutdown to advance his ideological project of reducing federal personnel, which strikes me as a dangerous political play within the politics of the shutdown proper. In any case, I expect novel things from Trump later this week.

• Republicans will find their footing as open-government defenders. The big shutdowns of the past have always been Republicans trying to leverage the shutdown, with Democrats demanding a clean reopening of the government under the status quo. On average, this comports with the ideology of the parties; Democrats tend to see government spending as productive and government programs as essential, while Republicans are more likely to see them as wasteful and expendable. Consequently, both sides have always been somewhat at home with the structure of the shutdowns. The talking points have aligned with the party ideology, and the positions have reinforced basic beliefs of their core voters.

  That won’t be true this week. But my hunch is the GOP—and it’s aligned interests—will easily rise to the challenge. After all, a huge proportion of government workers—like 70%—are in the defense and national security space. There are already examples of GOP interest-groups, particularly in defense and law enforcement, preparing anti-shutdown messaging. And president Trump quite famously has little concern or shame about taking whatever position is necessary to meet his political ends.

• Dems will struggle as the anti-government faction. On the flip side, I don’t think the Dems will ever quite feel comfortable this month with shutting down the government, at least not the way Republicans did in, say, 2013. And I think in an protracted shutdown, this begins to really eat at them in a consequential way. Especially if it gives Trump an excuse to further curtail many of the liberal-valued programs in the federal government. You won’t, for instance, find many Democrats saying things to the effect of it really doesn’t matter if the government is open or not.

With any luck, I will be wrong about my most basic prediction—that there will be a shutdown—and we won’t have to consider how accurate my predictions ended up being.

Cheers,

Matt

1. Confused about the difference, here’s my old shutdown primer.

2. Both markets reflect the odds for an actual OPM-noticed orderly shutdown, which would not include, for instance, some short lapses in appropriations that Congress resolved in the early morning hours of October 1st.