Why Is There No News?

I check Real Clear Politics twice a day for a take on the conventional wisdom. What's odd today is that nowhere in the list of headlines does the word "shutdown" appear. On the other hand, near the top of the list, there are two big think pieces on the No Kings demonstrations, which appear to be among the biggest non-events in history. But isn't the current government shutdown a much bigger dog that isn't barking?

Curious, I asked Chrome AI mode, "How is trump polling in the shutdown?" Normally, "AI" prefaces its response with a couple of paragraphs to let me know the correct way to think about the question, but this morning, it just listed a bunch of headline links without comment:

Newsweek: Donald Trump Is Winning the Government Shutdown, Polls Suggest
Reuters: Trump's approval edges up despite Americans blaming Republicans for shutdown
The Hill: Trump approval ticks up despite GOP shutdown blame: Survey
CNN: Could Democrats win the shutdown standoff? They’re still winning the blame game
PBS: Who’s winning the blame game over the shutdown? Here’s what a new AP-NORC poll shows

The PBS link, which we may assume is one of the most liberal, is hardly optimistic:

Roughly 6 in 10 Americans say President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of responsibility for the shutdown, while 54% say the same about Democrats in Congress, according to the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. At least three-quarters of Americans believe each deserves at least a “moderate” share of blame, underscoring that no one is successfully evading responsibility.

It looks like any take that the Democrats are "winning the blame game" even if Trump's popularity is rising is optiimistic indeed. The consensus of even liberal commentators is that the polling is a "jump ball". But only a little over half of US adults think the shutdown is a big deal at all:

The poll finds that 54% of U.S. adults call the shutdown a “major issue,” with just 11% saying it is “not a problem at all.” Democrats are most likely, at 69%, to see it as a major problem, but 59% of independents and 37% of Republicans feel the same way.

I decided to take a look at the paradigmatic shutdown, the pair of closures led by Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995-96. According to Wikipedia,

As a result of conflicts between Democratic President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress over funding for education, the environment, and public health in the 1996 federal budget, the United States federal government shut down from November 14 through November 19, 1995, and from December 16, 1995, to January 6, 1996, for 5 and 21 days, respectively. Republicans also threatened not to raise the debt ceiling.

. . . Polling generally showed that most respondents blamed congressional Republicans for the shutdowns, and Clinton's handling of the shutdowns may have bolstered his ultimately successful campaign in the 1996 presidential election. The second of the two shutdowns was the longest government shutdown in U.S. history until the 2018–2019 government shutdown surpassed it in January 2019.

. . . A 1995 ABC News poll had Republicans receiving the brunt of the blame with 46% of respondents compared to the 27% that blamed Clinton. Clinton's Gallup approval rating stood at 51% in the early days of the December shutdown, but fell significantly to 42% as it progressed into January. Once the shutdown had ended, however, his Gallup approval ratings rose to their highest since his election.

However, the overall political impact of the shutdown is harder to gauge. Its impact on the 1996 election, especially in Congress, was counterintuitive:

The shutdown also influenced the 1996 Presidential election. Bob Dole, the Senate Majority Leader, was running for president in 1996. Due to his need to campaign, Dole wanted to solve the budget crisis in January 1996 despite the willingness of other Republicans to continue the shutdown unless their demands were met. In particular, as Gingrich and Dole had been seen as potential rivals for the 1996 Presidential nomination, they had a tense working relationship.

. . . Gingrich stated that the first re-election of a Republican [House] majority since 1928 was due in part to the Republican Party's hard line on the budget. The Republican Party had a net loss of eight seats in the House in the 1996 elections but retained a 227-206-seat majority in the upcoming.

Dole lost the 1996 election, at least in part because he ran on the idea that his canmpaign was a "last mission for the greatest generation", which inevitably contrasted his age with the younger and comprehensively more vigorous Clinton. Dole certainly played to type two years later as the national spokesman for Viagra, which Clinton presumably didn't need -- this may have been the unspoken underlying issue of the campaign. It's also hard to argue with the implicit contrast with Gingrich's congrressional strategy in the election, where Dole stood for compromise while Gingrich continued a hard line. Republicans lost the presidency, while they held onto Congress.

A reasonable assessment that might be made across the 1995-96 and the 2025 shutdowns is that over the long term, energetic hardliners succeed electorally, while figures who seem namby-pamby or perhaps past their sell-by date don't. Right now, Trump is the energetic hardliner despite his age, while Schumer is as old as Dole was in 1996 and has the aura of letting women like AOC boss him around, while nobody's complaining that Schumer is too hot to trot. Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones didn't hurt Clinton in 1996, any more than Stormy Daniels and E Jean Carroll hurt Trump in 2024, which is to say that the ladies all subliminally worked to Clinton's and Trump's benefit, even in the context of shutdowns. But one of the few efforts I've seen to explain the current alignment omits these factors:

During the 2018-2019 government shutdown (the longest federal shutdown in US history lasting 35 days), Donald Trump's first term administration was ill prepared for the tactics used by the establishment media, Democrats and even saboteurs within his own cabinet. The narrative spin was highly effective in painting Trump as the villain, subverting his efforts to achieve lasting security at the southern border.

The 2018 shutdown hinged largely on the fight between Republicans and Democrats over funding for a border wall that would ensure far lower illegal immigration numbers well after Trump left office. The construction cost of $5.7 billion seems like a pittance compared to the projected cost of $350 billion to deport alien migrants over four years.

Seen from this perspective, I would say the problem in 2018-19 was that the issue was too specific and not couched in bigger terms. In 2025, the issue isn't budgetary line items, the issue is Trump vs Schumer, just as after the 1995-1996 shutdowns, the issue became Clinton vs Dole. I think in both cases, the outcome will favor the higher-profile, more energetic figure. Dole lost to Clinton in 1996, but Gingrich won as well. Something like that dynamic is happening now.

So of course, there's no news about it.