Did Democrats Win the Shutdown After All?

On October 1st, in the hours after Senate Democrats forced a government shutdown, I argued that starting a fight seemed to be the point. Earlier in the year, Chuck Schumer, the Minority Leader, had rallied enough votes to keep the government open and faced a furious backlash from the Democratic base; capitulating again would have been politically intolerable. As the Times columnist Ezra Klein observed , a shutdown also presented the Democrats with an opportunity to focus public attention on President Donald Trump’s corruption, turning what had been a “diffuse crisis” into an “acute” one. In the end, the Democrats mostly oriented their demands toward health care—above all, the renewal of expiring Obamacare subsidies—as opposed to, say, prioritizing more abstract ultimatums related to