The Shutdown Isn’t Going How I Expected

Republicans are taking the blame, and some are starting to crack.

The November 1995 shutdown may not have had sombrero deepfakes, but it did have the “Cry Baby” caricature.

The drawing emerged early in that fall’s funding gap, after House Speaker Newt Gingrich uncorked a simmering complaint while chatting with reporters.

During a return trip from Israel after the funeral of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Gingrich said, President Bill Clinton had seated him in the back of Air Force One, ignored him the whole flight, and then made him exit from the rear of the plane.

“You’ve been on the plane for 25 hours and nobody has talked to you, and they ask you to get off the plane by the back ramp … You just wonder, Where is their sense of manners? Where is their sense of courtesy?” Gingrich said.

Gingrich said the “snub” was “part of why you ended up with us sending down a tougher continuing resolution” that Republicans knew Clinton would veto, hurtling the country into a shutdown. “It’s petty,” Gingrich acknowledged. “But I think it’s human.”

Take a look at the cover of the New York Daily News the next morning, as shown here by a young congressman named Charles E. Schumer. (I wonder what happened to him?)

It would be overstating things to call this tabloid cover a “turning point” in the 1995 shutdown. For one thing, there were two 1995 shutdowns. The first one ended only a few days after this episode, but that didn’t stop another one from starting in December and lasting into January 1996.

Still, it’s true that — to the extent anyone remembers anything from these two funding spats — the Gingrich “Cry Baby” cover became an enduring image of the 1995 shutdowns. The incident had a noticeable impact on opinions of Gingrich, whose popularity tanked during the shutdowns, as the perception emerged that he was plunging the country into chaos over a petty snub. Gingrich would later call the Air Force One comment “the single most avoidable mistake I made during my first three years as speaker.” His favorability rating never recovered.

In the same vein, I doubt anyone will remember much from this current shutdown, now in its tenth day, after — what? — a few months? Weeks? Days?

But, for me, just like the “Cry Baby” episode ended up representing Newt Gingrich’s miscalculations in the ’90s, if this shutdown ends up slipping out of Republicans’ hands, this will be the moment I return to:

The current House speaker, Mike Johnson, went on C-SPAN yesterday to take calls from viewers across the country.¹ In the clip above, he received one from Samantha, who said she was a Republican voter from Virginia whose husband is currently serving in the military. Samantha said that her family will have difficulty affording medication that her children need if the shutdown extends to October 15, which is when service members will miss their first paycheck.

Samantha urged Johnson to bring the chamber back to session to vote on a bill to fund military salaries. “I’m begging you to pass this legislation,” she said. “My kids could die.” She added: “The audacity of someone who makes six figures a year to do this to military families is insane.”

It must burn Johnson up to hear a call like that. That is not how he expected this shutdown to go. He thought, by this point, Chuck Schumer would be the one getting calls like that, urging him to reopen the government — or at least to do right by our men and women in uniform. Instead, it was Johnson who had to convince Samantha (a Republican voter, no less) that he was making the right choice by staying out of session.

In fairness, that’s not how a lot of us expected this shutdown to go, myself included. The conventional wisdom was that the party making extra demands on a continuing resolution would be the party that bears the blame for the shutdown. Here, that’s Democrats. And yet, according to a polling average tabulated by the Democratic pollster Adam Carlson, public surveys conducted since the shutdown began show voters blaming Republicans more than Democrats by a 10.5-point margin. (And that’s even a 0.5-point shift towards blaming Republicans since the shutdown began.)

At best for Republicans, some polls — like this one from Reuters that allowed voters to assign blame to multiple parties, instead of having to pick one — show a healthy amount of blame to go around for both sides. But, remarkably, not a single poll has to come out so far showing Democrats bearing more blame than Republicans, which is the outcome I and most other political journalists expected.

The conventional wisdom was also wrong in another sense. The general expectation here in Washington was that Democrats would start to see cracks in their unity first. I personally witnessed, on the eve of the shutdown, several Democratic senators in purple states who seemed to be wavering about whether to vote against the Republican funding proposal. Ultimately, all but three voted “no” that night, and only the same three² have split from the Democratic position in the five votes since.

Instead of vulnerable Democrats being worn down by repeated votes on the CR and eventually voting “yea” (as GOP leaders expected), many vulnerable Republicans are starting to waver on their party’s position. During a conference call yesterday, at least three House Republicans reportedly raised concerns about Johnson’s strategy of staying in recess and urged him to bring the chamber back to Washington.

“I think we’re gonna get to a point where it’s damaging to continue to keep the House out of session,” Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-CA) said, according to MSNBC. “I think we’ve gotten to that point.”

Meanwhile, many House Republicans — echoing Samantha — have urged Johnson to hold a vote on military pay. Even Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), a member of Johnson’s leadership team, joined this chorus yesterday.³ There are now about as many Republicans calling on their party to end the shutdown by eliminating the filibuster as there are Democrats calling on their party to end the shutdown by ending their filibuster. One party is starting to splinter under pressure, and it’s not the Democrats.

Why is this going wrong for Republicans? What did I and other commentators mis?? Below the fold, in my weekly column for paid subscribers, I’ll unpack my thoughts on the shutdown as it approaches the two-week mark — and explain how I think I may have cracked the code that explains how voters decide who to blame for shutdowns.