Michael Barbaro

A pinky promise.

There you go.

And so the bad is that the timing of this shutdown ending is coming just as the Democratic Party was actually starting to feel some rare momentum in the Trump era.

That's exactly when the Democrats chose to cave, seemingly when things were going great.

And so this decision to cave at this moment is unleashing the anger and energy that has been burbling beneath the surface for months, which is the Democrats are angry at their own party.

And they have been all year.

They have been basically since Kamala Harris lost.

And the shutdown was this sort of notable little reprieve where Democrats kind of stopped hating Democrats for a little while.

I mean, there was a Quinnipiac poll over the summer that showed that Democratic approval rating

of Democrats in Congress was at 39%.

That's a really bad stat.

And that same pollster took a poll in October, and it had jumped 20 percentage points to 58%.

Not great, right?

People aren't suddenly in love.

It's a big increase.

I'll be really interested to see what those numbers look like now that that bubble of hope had been inflated and deflated in this shutdown.

Well, talk about the consequences of having created this hope bubble, this idea that the shutdown was going to lead to meaningful changes in the country's healthcare system, which we don't think they are.

And in a broader sense, would show that Democrats were willing to really take on the president, which they were until they weren't.

I mean, this was always the risk of entering the shutdown, right?

Chuck Schumer was very clear about why they should have this shutdown, what they were fighting for, but there wasn't an endgame to get out of it with a win on policy.