If you are reading this newsletter, you’ve probably heard the federal government is not doing the whole governing thing at the moment.

I’ll spare you another thinkpiece evaluating the strategery, vigor, and messaging prowess of Charles E. Schumer, and other such musings.

Instead, I want to unpack how top Democrats are playing this episode, which serves as a near-perfect microcosm of the field itself. I even made a supercut for you:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Brawling for the working class (and proving she’s the party’s most effective messenger). AOC has delivered the hardest-hitting version of the Democratic message, centering the families whose premiums stand to double. Asked by Chris Hayes – in an interview I thought was even stronger than her widely praised video with Bernie – if Schumer is waging this fight to stave off a primary challenge from her, she responded, “This is so not about me… This is about people being able to insure their children.” She then sent a message to any Rs who see her as the fulcrum of the shutdown: they are welcome to negotiate with her directly if they want to protect people’s access to their insulin and chemotherapy.

Chris Murphy: Giving you the five-alarm-fire truth with righteous indignation. While most Ds have sought to narrowly focus the shutdown on their well-polling health care demands, Murphy has been clear for months that he sees Trump as a lawless tyrant and thinks it would be insane for the opposition party to give his regime the imprimatur of bipartisan legitimacy; Dems would be financing his unprecedented abuses of power, while Trump continues his practice of simply refusing to spend appropriated funding that’s not to his liking. Kind of hard to argue with?

Ro Khanna: Blanketing the media with unconventional candor. Khanna is as clear-eyed & candid as Murphy, but disarmingly mild-mannered. He’s ventured to Trump-friendly platforms like Fox & All-In to calmly explain the futility of cutting spending deals with a guy who just withholds the money and debunk the GOP’s health care lies, taking special aim as always at 2028 favorite / fellow Yale Law grad JD Vance. Notably, as many Ds gloss over the Senate’s 60 vote threshold in blaming the majority party for the shutdown, Khanna is the only one I’ve seen explicitly arguing Rs should just nuke the filibuster, standing by his long-held position on the arcane Senate rule.

Elissa Slotkin: Beating other Ds to the punch with a forceful position. Underratedly, Slotkin may have been the first Senate Democrat to stake out a compelling, bright-line, health care-focused position on the shutdown. Since early August, she’s been clear that if Rs wanted her vote on a new spending deal, they’d need to play ball on three things: renewing ACA subsidies, reversing Medicaid cuts, and restoring medical research funding. More than a month later, Dems largely ended up where she’s been all along. It’s not the first time she’s decided to set the terms of debate, seeing little leadership from her more senior colleagues…

Ruben Gallego: Fighting MAGA on their terms with gritty authenticity. In a characteristic interview with CBS’s Major Garrett last week, Gallego accidentally (?) dropped an F-bomb, landed his message about the GOP making people sicker and poorer (despite a few stumbles), and displayed his fluency in MAGA gamesmanship (and moderation on immigration enforcement) as he urged Rs to propose legislative text to address their concerns about illegal immigrants accessing federally funded health care programs, if that’s what this is really all about.

Gavin Newsom: Mercilessly trolling Trump and his minions. Like, literally tweeting out edited clips that depict JD Vance and Speaker Johnson as the little yellow Minions, among other trolls. His viral mockery has been effective thus far (see: surging approval ratings, 2028 odds, etc.) though I do have questions about its durability… On a more serious but equally illustrative note, he urged Dems to hold the line, warning that if “you lose leverage, you lose this country.” 

Josh Shapiro: Selling you on Pennsylvania, where government actually delivers. Shapiro is constantly touting PA’s successes, implicitly juxtaposing his bipartisan leadership & effective governance against DC’s dysfunction and mudslinging (though he’s facing his own budget impasse). While he hasn’t leaned as hard into the shutdown as others, he’s been quick to assure folks PA remains “open for business” and will work with the feds to mitigate harms.

Wes Moore: Selling you on Maryland, but with way more bravado. Like Shapiro, Moore loves to rattle off his state’s accomplishments, though he tends to dial down the bipartisanship and dial up the bluster, increasingly eager to play the Trump foil in recent days. On night one of the shutdown, he recorded a lengthy direct-to-camera address from his office, declaring, among other things, that Maryland “will never bend the knee.”

Gretchen Whitmer: So focused on Michigan she’s barely heard of Washington. On the morning the federal shutdown began, Gov. Whitmer was up until 4am hammering out a deal with Michigan’s divided legislature to save her state from emulating DC, as she gleefully relayed to reporters when asked about the standoff. Then, she quickly steered away from national politics, which she seems genuinely disinterested in.

Andy Beshear is making the moral appeal to our better angels; Mark Kelly is very soberly explaining what is happening & why it’s bad; JB Pritzker has Art of The Deal zingers, but is more focused on ‘Trump’s invasion’ of IL; Pete Buttigieg is highlighting the popular services ‘Trump’s shutdown’ is upending; and Kamala Harris is doing strongly-worded tweets & reportedly talking to Schumer –– all on brand.

BIG, BEAUTIFUL TRACKER HIGHLIGHTS OF THE WEEK: