Years ago, before Democrats came unhinged over their hatred of President Donald Trump, Americans generally cared about their country’s welfare.
Today, however, even in their responses to poll questions, hard-core Democrat voters no longer even pretend to embrace reasonable compromise.
According to a CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday, 55 percent of respondents said that Trump and Republicans got more of what they wanted from negotiations that ended the recent, record-setting, 43-day government shutdown, compared to only six percent who said the same about Democrats.
For more than six weeks, Senate Republicans tried in vain to end the shutdown, the longest in U.S. history.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, however, held his caucus together throughout the ordeal. Schumer, in fact, clearly viewed the shutdown as a political game designed to harm Trump.
Indeed, only Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania seemed willing to tell the truth about his party’s disgusting tactics.
Otherwise, Democrat leaders and their voters appeared committed to a strategy with no endgame. To execute that strategy in hopes of harming Trump, they proved willing to harm low-income Americans and military service members in the process.
Thus, when a few moderate Democrats finally voted to end the shutdown, Democrats went apoplectic.
Hence Democrats’ disappointment, as reflected in the latest CBS News/YouGov poll.
Will the government shutdown hurt Democrats in the 2026 midterms?
Tellingly, 55 percent of Democrat respondents believed that their party’s elected representatives compromised too much. Only 17 percent of Republicans said the same about their elected representatives.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, 50 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of Republicans told the pollster that Republicans got more of what they wanted from the shutdown-ending negotiations.
Likewise, Democrat respondents reported feeling “frustrated,” “dissatisfied,” and “pessimistic,” whereas Republicans most commonly responded that they felt “relieved,” “satisfied,” and “optimistic.”
With that in mind, it is worth examining the source of Democrats’ frustration, dissatisfaction, and pessimism.
Schumer led Democrats into a prolonged shutdown with no leverage and therefore no plausible endgame.
Of course, Democrat talking heads tried linking the shutdown to expiring Obamacare subsidies. But that argument rang hollow. After all, were Democrats really willing to impoverish SNAP beneficiaries and military service members simply to negotiate on health care? For how long would they have maintained that stance?
Democrat poll respondents’ negativity, therefore, stems not from an expectation of victory in the shutdown but from the perceived act of capitulation itself.
Think about it: Nowadays, fewer and fewer Democrats express love for their country. Many openly despise the United States. Why, then, would they care about a shutdown that harmed their fellow citizens?
Furthermore, Democrats more and more have embraced political brinkmanship or worse. Thousands of leftist ghouls celebrated the Sept. 10 assassination of conservative Christian icon Charlie Kirk. Even before Kirk’s murder, Democrats had begun to normalize and demand political violence.
In short, hard-core Democrats reacted with frustration, not because their leaders adopted and then abandoned a plausible strategy to obtain a tangible good, but because those Democrats view their side as having lost the shutdown, which, in their increasingly distorted worldview, equates to a loss of nerve in an existential, zero-sum game.
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