Democrats in Washington are blowing a big opportunity. Party leaders were seriously mulling a coordinated effort to block the GOP’s continuing resolution to fund the government and prevent a Friday shutdown, until Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer signalled that the Senate would not block passage of the bill. Schumer risks making a huge tactical error.

The shutdown strategy, as most political observers well know, became a hallmark of Tea Party-turned-MAGA populism. Republican leadership, much like Schumer today, always despised it because they believed that voters would punish the party for sowing chaos. In Democrats’ case, that risk is always higher because their own voters value the services that tend to be frozen during shutdowns at a higher rate.

Now, though, government workers and programmes are already taking a huge hit from DOGE, so a weekend shutdown would look like a drop in the bucket by comparison. It could also extract some concessions from Republicans which, even if symbolic, would show the party’s deeply disillusioned base that lawmakers are ready to fight.

A lesson many of us on the Right took from the Tea Party years is that grassroots voters don’t fear chaos. They demand it. They will reward you for it. They believe the system is utterly broken and want to see lawmakers gum up the works, even just to make a point.

I posed this theory to a senior Republican source. “Since the Tea Party, grassroots conservatives have become far more willing to embrace hardball tactics that meet Democrats blow for blow. There’s no more willingness to abide concessions for the sake of fake civility or worse, to bring a sense of (fake) stability to governance,” they said. “Democrats never think twice about breaking things to get their way, and they’re the ones reliant on the government operating in the first place — there is no political advantage for Republicans to attempt to calm things down; in fact it’s the opposite.”

Democrats, the source argues, have not historically been Burkean institutionalists. They packed the Supreme Court, for instance, and regularly complain about the Electoral College. In the early 2010s, though, Republican leadership started to learn the hard way that in post-bailout politics, their loyal grassroots voters were no longer prioritising the preservation of the status quo. As Democrats sought to oppose these populist conservatives, they increasingly became the party of the institutions, retreating away from attacks on the FBI, the Pentagon or — my personal favourite — Park Avenue.

Like Sen. Schumer, you may disagree with the substance of shutdown brinksmanship. But there’s really no question it would be popular with the activist base that Democrats need to energise. By the time midterms roll around, other voters will have forgotten or moved onto more salient concerns.

Watching Charlamagne the God call out Schumer on Friday felt like listening to Rush Limbaugh in 2013. “Dems get pushed around and bullied into doing Republican’s bidding,” he said, adding, “I do hate people who are not fighting for the American people but claim to be fighting for the American people.”

This quote from a Meidas Touch video could literally be plucked from the pages of The Blaze during the Tea Party years: “Grow a spine. Vote against cloture. Vote against the CR… The American people are with you… Stop being spineless. Fight for the people.” Activists even trickled onto the streets to demand Democrats vote no on the CR.

Democrats could spend the weekend showing some genuine anger and resistance to Trump. They could be all over media proudly owning the “Schumer Shutdown” label, saying “Damn right this is a Schumer shutdown. This is a crisis and we demand a better deal, no matter what it takes.”

This would have built up goodwill with their grassroots, energised the base, and provided some moral clarity at a time when so many Democrats are lost at sea. Would they get many concessions? Likely not. Republicans would have enjoyed the schadenfreude, as Democrats usually do when the shoe is on the other foot.

Democratic leadership in the Trump era became very risk averse, attempting to benefit from GOP chaos by reigning in its own populists and calmly riding out the wave. That may work in general elections, but this shutdown fight is forcing Democrats like Chuck Schumer — who may now face a leadership challenge like Sen. Mitch McConnell — to understand their grassroots is not the same as their swing voters, and that makes a huge difference between cycles.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington D.C. Correspondent.

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