this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2025
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Eight days into the government shutdown, Senate Democratic communications directors received a private briefing and a memo from pollster Geoff Garin.

The crux of the message: Stay the course because Democrats are winning the battle of public opinion.

“Voters continue to blame Trump and Republicans more than Democrats for the shutdown,” said the memo, which was obtained by NBC News and featured new polling data conducted by Hart Research, with findings that are backed by other public national surveys on the shutdown fight.

It added that voters are siding with Democrats’ health care funding demands, that Republicans are starting to "feel the heat” on the issue and that the GOP’s political pain will worsen “the longer and more aggressively” Democrats litigate it.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20251010123231/https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/emboldened-democrats-dig-health-care-demands-shutdown-fight-rcna236625

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[–] Kalon@lemmy.world 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

They should also be demanding that Adelita Grijalv be sworn in. Once again they are obstructing the lawful Democratic process, and should be called out for it. Particularly when we've seen it happen so many times before and in this case it is being done to protect pedophiles.

[–] gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

Yeah, there's a lot more they should be doing, but I'm just elated that for the first time in 2025 they're doing something. Force the Republicans to capitulate, show people that they don't have the power or political capital to just do whatever they want and that governing actually requires serving the whole country and not just their narrow supporter base, and then build the case that the modern Republican party is uniquely incapable of doing that.

Regardless of what kind of policy you want, the fact that Republicans are just making a goddamn mess out of everything is going to be undeniable the longer this goes, and there's a big chunk of the American public that unfortunately doesn't care about migrants' human rights or democratic elections or a lot of other stuff I care about, but they do care that their government is a goddamn incompetent mess.

[–] Sprocketfree@sh.itjust.works 5 points 5 months ago

If the Republicans want to open the government so bad why don't they just vote yes on the Democrats bill?

[–] Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca -1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

They are losing their democracy and now they are fighting for healthcare against an installed dictatorship.

This is captured opposition. Inept on purpose.

[–] gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

now they are fighting

That's the important part. Gotta start somewhere.

Inept on purpose

Really hard to say that definitively because determining why people do things is always a matter of speculation, but the way this is playing out definitely underscores how inept backing down on the last time the government nearly shutdown this spring was.

[–] Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca -1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

No. I'm sure you're a nice, well meaning person, but this take is ridiculous.

Let's say the D's fight reawy reawy hawrd and get a healthcare provision put in the next bill. Yay! Small victory right? Except you weren't fighting the existential fight of preventing a fascist dictatorship from installing itself. Once the dictatorship is fully installed and in control, the healthcare provisions mean NOTHING. The D's existence means nothing. Voting no longer exists. It a classic 'win the battle and lose the war' that the Dems have excelled at for 30 years as a fully captured opposition.

You can't seem to see this and that is why you are fucked. Any real opposition should be planning for civil war.