What Is the Point of Voting for Democrats?

While some may understandably read this as yet another trollish headline from a dreaded Bernie Bro, I think this is the seminal question facing the Democratic Party in the wake of the 2024 election, one that Senate Democrats proved themselves unable to answer yet again last night. The government shutdown is nearly over, as it cleared its most significant hurdle yesterday when eight spineless Democrats caved on their core demand of a one-year extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies (that was an election year gift to the GOP that they’re too stupid to accept). All Democrats got out of this deal is a symbolic vote on these subsidies that have as much of a chance of passing as a Trump impeachment vote. Angus King, an Independent who caucuses with the Dems, summarized the Democratic Party’s strategy in Trump 2.0 as well as anyone has when explaining why the party folded like a lawn chair in a hurricane yesterday.

Sen. Angus King: “Standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) November 10, 2025 at 6:35 AM

Why would you vote for a Democrat who says that they don’t think standing up to Trump is a good strategy? What’s the difference between a Democrat letting Trump walk all over them and a Republican thanking him for the honor of it? There is no Article I right now. Congress doesn’t exist in a strict Constitutional sense. Trump controls the purse strings, and the Supreme Court is backing him up on this theft of Congress’ core power. The fact that Democrats centered their asks around an important yet arcane bit of policy and not, like, the fact that Trump doesn’t adhere to the deals he strikes with Congress, just proves how unfit for this moment Chuck Schumer’s band of Vichy losers are. Why would you make any deal with a man who has already proven he won’t stick to your agreements? Many people who actually had to suffer in order for the Democrats to get absofuckingloutely nothing out of their misery are reaching out to reporters today, and they’re not happy.

I received this email about Democrats caving to end the shutdown from one of the SNAP recipients I spoke to:

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— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) November 10, 2025 at 7:17 AM

Hearing from more people after this went out.

“We’re all pissed. This was a lot of unnecessary stress on people and their families for nothing. And if I win the lottery tonight I absolutely will spend millions to hire people to follow these 8 Dems around for a year and make their lives miserable.”

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— Dave Levitan (@davelevitan.bsky.social) November 10, 2025 at 7:40 AM

And make no mistake, this is not just eight Democrats going rogue like Chuck Schumer’s no vote wants you to believe. His fingerprints are all over this. The man with the worst poker face in politics gave away the game before the Dems announced they were bending the knee to dear leader. The whole caucus met, Schumer did his cutesy bullshit telling reporters to “stay tuned” with a grin on his face, then the exact amount of people needed to pass the continuing resolution emerged, all conveniently either retiring (Jeanne Shaheen, Dick Durbin), or up for reelection in 2028 (Maggie Hasan, Caroline Cortez Mastro, John Fetterman) or 2030 (Tim Kaine, Jacky Rosen, Angus King). Back in May when Schumer orchestrated a cave to the crypto industry, The American Prospect published a follow-up story, detailing how the process of trading real-world leverage for a symbolic vote everyone knew would never pass is called “Schumer 101” in the Beltway.

So here, like back in March when Schumer first capitulated on the government shutdown, claiming that it set him up to make a better deal now (whoopsies!), we have a situation where the Democrats have folded the only real world leverage they have in order to obtain a vote that will fail that Jeanne Shaheen wants you believe means something.

Reporter: What do you say to your colleagues who say this isn’t a fight, this is a capitulation?

Shaheen: We have a guaranteed vote by a guaranteed date…

Reporter: There is no guarantee that this will become law.

Shaheen: There was never a guarantee that it would be become law.

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) November 9, 2025 at 7:40 PM

Shaheen told Fox News that “we kept leadership informed throughout” this planned surrender. According to Talking Point Memo’s Founder Josh Marshall, “The Senators who want to vote yes on basically any terms appear to be Shaheen, Hassan, King and Fetterman.” The outline of this is that it looks like Schumer got steamrolled by four people in his caucus and didn’t receive enough backup behind him to generate any real pushback. Inertia seems to have dictated much of this, although a planned post-election capitulation would make sense too. There is also one theory among Beltway political watchers that protecting the filibuster is what this was really about. In the wake of last week’s elections, Trump became increasingly hysteric in calling for Republicans to kill it, and there are many Democrats who clearly do not want to see that happen. Everyone always knew that Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema were taking the heat for a far larger pro-filibuster swath of the caucus less brave than Kirsten freaking Sinema, and the fact that even Bernie Sanders opposes getting rid of the chief obstacle to enacting his agenda gives you an idea of how deep the institutionalist rot runs in the Democratic Senate. Or maybe that’s all too galaxy-brained and Democrats just got tired of flight delays on their weekend trips home and wanted to get rid of them—never underestimate Congress’ desire to not work as one of their chief motivators.

But all roads lead to cowardice and capitulation, which brings me back to my title. What is the point of voting for someone like Chuck Schumer who is unwilling or unable to meet this moment? If the outcome is fealty to authoritarianism in either instance, why bother getting off the couch to vote? As much as everyone’s ire is concentrated on the man supposedly in charge, don’t lose sight of the fact that he and Dick Durbin were reelected unanimously by their colleagues a month after Trump won last year. Chuck Schumer is more like NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell than Mitch McConnell. The Democratic Senate as a whole is a problem. Bernie, ever the institutionalist and filibuster supporter, is a problem. We would be better off if we replaced every single member of the Senate caucus with a random local Democrat from their state.

The good news is that we are in the midst of a changing of the guard within the Democratic Party, and you can see it in local races or the more energetic House with a few members already calling for Chuck Schumer’s ouster from Democratic leadership. It’s 2025, nearly 2026, and Zohran Mamdani is a Democrat–while Andrew Cuomo, backed by fellow sex pest Bill Clinton, is not. That dynamic is warping a lot of politics in strange and unexpected directions these days.

Vibes among House Democrats and activists, “The Senate is the enemy”

— Eric Michael Garcia (@ericmgarcia.bsky.social) November 9, 2025 at 7:00 PM

The Senate is the enemy by Constitutional design, and this body’s inherent anti-democratic nature was even tacitly acknowledged in Board of Estimate of City of New York v. Morris when the Supreme Court unanimously declared the board unconstitutional on the grounds that Brooklyn, the city’s most populous borough, did not have greater representation than the city’s least populous borough in Staten Island. Replace those two locations with California and Wyoming and it’s difficult to see a difference, but Senate Democrats do. These institutionalists have deep reverence for a process that allows for Nebraska’s cow population to overrule most of New York’s human population. Like the anti-democratic body they admire, institutionalists are hopeless by design.

An estimated 19 million 2020 Joe Biden voters did not vote in 2024, and one look at polls right now proves that the only thing America dislikes more than Donald Trump is the Democratic Party. Their base has collapsed. The vote blue no matter who wine moms from 2016 are now ready to tear down Chuck Schumer’s door and throw the bum out for not abolishing ICE. I genuinely do not know who this party’s base is anymore outside a dwindling minority of MSNBC viewers and New York Times readers. A Wall Street Journal poll from earlier this year revealed just eight percent of voters had a “very favorable” opinion of the Democrats, compared to 19 percent who have a “very favorable” view of the GOP, demonstrating how Trump’s core base of support is still double the size of the Democrats. This gerontocratic party is playing with fire right now, as they have a very powerful force they can utilize to build huge majorities off the mounting backlash to Trump, or they can fumble the bag and watch it get wielded against them.

Negative polarization is the name of the game in our political era, and Senate Democrats have done yeoman’s work to get the entire electorate, Democrat, Independent and Republican, and now perhaps the Democratic House, to negatively polarize against them. The party is at something of a crossroads, as their 2020 coalition collapsed, but Trump’s 2024 coalition did too. The lesson of 2024 isn’t that Trumpism is strong, but that the biggest competition Democrats face when they instill apathy in their voters is not voting at all. If Senate Democrats get their way, that will be the theme of 2026 and 2028 across another demoralized electorate. We can only hope that the rabid furor in the House and the small-d democratic fervor expressed in the 2025 elections eventually primaries the foot soldiers for collapse out of the party, lest Democrats give way to the bleak structural dynamics in the Senate and the increasingly gerrymandered House and turn into a permanent minority party only able to cast symbolic votes. Or as some may call this apocalyptic vision for future Democrats: Schumer 101.