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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts about the impending end to the government shutdown. David argues that the fight within the Democratic Party about ending the shutdown isn’t about the shutdown itself; rather, it’s about the future face of the party. David argues that now is a good moment to make a deal and that the Democrats have accomplished all they could hope to from the shutdown. He also cautions that allowing the left wing of the Democrats’ base to use any potential deal as a means to push the party in a more confrontational, more radical path must be avoided.

Then David is joined by The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell. David and Sarah discuss the exit polls from this year’s elections and the current state of play within the American electorate. Sarah discusses how the increasing gender gap in voting patterns reflects a broader polarization between higher- and lower-information voters. Sarah also discusses how Donald Trump has upended everything we thought we knew about voting patterns and the uneasy position Republicans find themselves in once he’s off the ballot.

Finally, David closes with a talk about The Emergency, a new novel by The Atlantic’s George Packer.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Sarah Longwell, known to so many of you from her many TV appearances discussing her focus groups. We’re going to be talking about the recent 2025 November elections, what they tell us about the American electorate, and especially what they tell us about the enormous gender gap that has opened between the voting patterns of women and men, and especially the youngest women and the youngest men. What is going on with the young voters who turned out, the women, so overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates in 2025? So I’ll be talking to Sarah about that.

My book this week will be a new novel by my Atlantic colleague George Packer. The novel is called The Emergency, and it’s a haunting portrait of a world in decline that bears important resemblances to our own while clearly not being our own. It is a disturbing but beautiful work, and I strongly recommend it, and I’ll talk at the end of this podcast about why the book so spoke to me.

But before any of that, I wanna offer some thoughts about the ending of the government shutdown. I’m recording this podcast on Monday, November 10, so the deal to end the government shutdown has not quite been concluded as I speak, but a conclusion of some kind is imminent, accelerated perhaps by the havoc of this past weekend of air travel, one of the worst weekends for air travel in the United States since 9/11, that has left many people delayed or outright stranded, flights canceled. And as the government shutdown has come to an end, there’s been an upsurge of protest and outright anger from some of the most active and committed Democrats that they have been sold out by their party, having led the longest shutdown in American history, and many on the Democratic side think that there’s been a kind of sellout or disappointment. I wanna put some context on this because I don’t agree with any of that, and I think the Democrats are in danger of making some very bad decisions in reaction to the impulses and pressure from their most activist wing.

It’s important to understand that many Washington arguments are not actually about what they purport to be about. When Democrats argue about the ending of the government shutdown, they’re not just arguing about that. What they’re really arguing about is: What should the future face of the Democratic Party look like? Should it be more radical, more confrontational? Or should it be trying to find some kind of alignment with a broader consensus in American society? And one of the reasons that the figures in the Democratic Party who have led the negotiation to end the government shutdown have come under such fire is they are attractive targets for a party some of whose leading voices wanna remake the party entirely, in a much more militant way.

Now, let’s talk about the merits of the complaint before we get to the larger discussion that this complaint stands in for. First, the merits of the complaint: There was no way the shutdown was going to end any way differently from the way it did. The only question was how long it would take. Would the Democrats arrive at their present outcome in 20 days or 30 or 40—or, as some now wish, 50? But if this shutdown went on for 10 more days or 12 more days, if it spoiled Thanksgiving travel, the outcome of the shutdown would be in no way different. What this shutdown was ostensibly about was the renewal of tax credits under the Affordable Care Act.

Now, I’m gonna go into some detail here because we need to be clear about the unrealism of the demands. So the Affordable Care Act, of course, was passed by President [Barack] Obama. It went into effect in 2014. And among its provisions were a series of tax credits to subsidize the purchase of health insurance by people whose incomes were below a certain level. Those tax credits were in effect from 2014 to 2020. During the pandemic, President [Joe] Biden made the tax credits temporarily more generous in 2021, and the next year, in 2022, he extended those more generous tax credits until 2025—he and the Democratic Congress of that time. The tax credits were written by President Biden to expire, and the reason they were written to expire, well, it was twofold. First, they were really expensive. And many even in President Biden’s own party didn’t think that this level of expense, which was justified by the pandemic, should go on forever. And anyway, there are budget rules where, if you had made the tax credits permanent, you would’ve needed a bigger voting majority to pass them into law than was needed when they were made temporary. So it was President Biden and the Democratic Congress of 2021 and 2022 that made them temporary in the first place.

Now, had the Democrats won the election of 2024, I’m sure that President Kamala Harris would’ve tried to make the tax credits more permanent, either extend them for a long period of time or write them into law altogether. And if she had carried a Democratic House with her and enough Democratic senators, maybe she would’ve been successful, but probably not, because unless she had a very liberal Senate, they probably would’ve flinched from the cost. So these tax credits were on their way out anyway.

Now, that is a counterfactual speculation because, of course, the important point is she lost, and it didn’t happen. And there was no way that they were going to be continued indefinitely by a President Trump administration; the votes just weren’t there to do it. So when the Democrats made this big demonstration, they were engaged not in a real-world legislating exercise. The votes were never there to do what the Democrats wanted. There was no amount of shutdown that would ever change the votes and conjure them into being. The question for Democrats was: How did they drive home the point that President Trump was not as keen on health-care credits as they were? How did they message that? And the shutdown was their chosen way of messaging.

Shutdowns come with a lot of pain. They do a lot of harm to the economy. In this case, they brought harm to people who depend on federal food-aid relief. They brought harm to air travelers. They brought harm to many, many people: government employees, who expect their salary to be paid on time, and military people, civilian people. They bring disruption. They are very painful events, and they should not be accepted as regular parts of American life, although that’s what they have become.

But the contest in a shutdown is to use this pain as a kind of teaching exercise. Normally, the party that initiates the shutdown fails, not only fails on getting what it wants—everyone always fails; they never succeed in getting you what they want—but they also fail even to change the conversation. When Newt Gingrich shut down the government in 1994 and ’95 under President [Bill] Clinton, he was trying to drive home a message of budget austerity affecting even the Medicare program. Not only did he fail to get what he wanted from Medicare, but he contributed to the fallen popularity of the Republican Congress, first elected in 1994, and helped to reelect Bill Clinton. When President Trump, in 2018, 2019, shut down the government to try to force funds for the border wall—billions of dollars for a new border wall—he didn’t get the money. But he also drove home the point that the Trump priorities were not the same as the priorities of the American voter, that he was not the voter for the average person that he had represented himself as in 2016. And again, that government shutdown was an important reason why President Trump lost reelection in 2020, along, of course, with the COVID nightmare.

This time, Democrats had better success.