Michael Barbaro

The term that has come up as I've talked to Democratic strategists has been that this feels like a self-own for the Democratic Party, that the Democratic Party had been riding high after a rough week for Donald Trump.

And here, starting this next week, they decided this was the moment to give up a fight that the party's base had been craving and one that they seemingly had been winning, at least politically.

I want you to answer, to the best of your ability, this very simple question.

Taken in its totality, if we assume this shutdown is going to soon be over, was this a good experience for the Democrats or a bad one?

Let's start with the good.

The good is that the Democratic Party has clearly elevated two issues that it feels are the winning issues for the party.

The first is health care.

And the second is affordability told through health care.

And...

Those have been the dominant topic of conversation for weeks, which is pretty hard to pull off when you're the minority party with no power in Washington.

And it took a shutdown for them to do that and for them to elevate those issues in hopes that long past the shutdown, voters will think, oh, that's the party that's actually fighting for me on those issues.

Right.

So that's one side of the ledger, the good side.

That's the good side.

But the risk of that fight was inflating people's expectations that they were actually going to win something on those issues, right?

They had to say, we're fighting for this because we want XYZ outcomes.

And they didn't get those outcomes.

They've got the promise of a vote, which is not guaranteed to pass.

Right.

Someone called it a pinky promise.