What would Harry Reid have done?

Would he have done what Schumer did during the shutdown?

65 days to publication of my Harry Reid biography — don’t forget to preorder! — and I was recently musing about how he would have handled the recent government shutdown. So I wrote a piece:

On Oct. 10, 2013, as a government shutdown entered its tenth day, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid received an email from his chief of staff, David Krone.

“(Chuck) Schumer wants to do a deal for the sake of doing a deal, and, sadly, so he can say he was the person who did the deal,” Krone wrote to his boss.

Reid, who had been holding the line as Republicans attempted to gut his signature legislative achievement, The Affordable Care Act, responded to Krone a couple of hours later.

“I briefly talked to him and said stop,” Reid replied.

Six days later, in a denouement that Schumer was part of, the shutdown ended and the ACA was preserved.

Fast forward to this week in Washington, DC, and the shutdown issue once again centered around Obamacare. The Democrats, with Nevadans Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen among those voting with the Republicans while Schumer cast a meaningless no vote, could elicit was a promise from Majority Leader John Thune of a vote on extending the ACA subsidies. As the screaming on BlueSky threatens to break the Internet and progressives and their media allies call for Schumer’s head, it is reasonable to ask: What would Reid have done?

As someone who has a biography of the late senator coming out early next year, I think, like the man himself, the answer is not black and white. Reid, with his right-hand Krone buttressing him and warning him about Schumer undermining him (as he did several times during his tenure), would have had a stiff spine. But, as ever, he would have played the long game, absorbed the progressive pummeling and focused on how this potentially sets up Democrats in the 2026 fight for congressional supremacy.

Or as a Democratic insider put it: “Reid never let bad press get in the way of good strategy. He would take short term pain for long-term gain.”

One Reid friend agreed and told me he probably would have been satisfied with this resolution:

“The feeding frenzy on Schumer created by a handful of Democrats caving doesn’t actually reflect the reality of what was accomplished,” the Reid friend said. “The ACA /health care premiums is now clearly front and center in the fight for ‘26 and Trump looks more callous and corrupt than ever. (Schumer) did that by being willing to stand up to Trump.”

That may be a generous view, but we won’t know if it is borne out until a year from now. It’s true that the dynamics of 2013 – Democratic president, Senate controlled by Democrats, House by Republicans – are markedly different from 2025 – a GOP trifecta.

But what Reid always felt was that the politics of shutdown aftermaths are ephemeral and keeping the eye on the prize of the next election was paramount. The real difference it seems, as the eight Democratic defectors showed, was that Reid had a hammerlock on his caucus with his backroom brilliance and one-on-one stroking that Schumer simply does not have.

Schumer’s reputation is that of an outside player, but one who loves to make deals and then talk about them on the Sunday shows. Reid was the opposite: a born fighter, literally and figuratively, who would rather punch his way off the ropes and relished taking on the largest foes, even if he could be intemperate on or off “Meet The Press.”

Said one longtime Reid observer: “Reid hated bullies. And Trump is the biggest bully of them all. Would have been an epic showdown.”

Reid instilled a mixture of fear and loyalty in his caucus, and his members knew he would always have their backs, even if they didn’t always agree with him. He was inclusive, bringing Schumer, Washington state’s Patty Murray and Illinois’ Dick Durbin into his kitchen Cabinet. But when he was negotiating a deal, whether it was with Barack Obama or Mitch McConnell, he did not allow any talks to go on without his knowledge.

He was always focused on getting from A to B, no matter how bumpy the road might be. As Krone emailed Reid well before the shutdown actually occurred in 2013, on Aug. 28:

“We need to start thinking more about the end game and less about the process. (This is really important.)”

If his first salvo didn’t achieve a result, Reid would advise his frustrated staff to be patient, that he would get there in time.

“If he had forced the shutdown, he would have singularly focused on that outcome from the start, been in close contact with caucus members and not let any bipartisan group negotiate on anything but that end unless it was with his knowledge and consent,” one Reid intimate told me. “He would have had a plan for an offramp. If you pick a fight, you have to stay in the fight. can’t back down without something meaningful.”

I’m sure Reid would have had some sympathy for Schumer’s predicament because unlike the 2013 matrix, the New York senator had very little leverage. But Reid – and especially his senior staff – would have understood that the appearance of caving so soon after a countrywide Democratic wave a few days earlier would cause a fierce backlash.

Reid might not have cared, and he would have insisted that the election was an eternity away and Democrats would be fine. Of course, even though he saved the ACA in 2013, the Democratic carnage in November 2014 almost cost him his leadership and caused friction with The White House along the way.

Perhaps a better analogy to the current situation for Democrats is not the 2013 shutdown but even further back in time.

In 2005, riding high after his re-election, President George W. Bush said he had amassed political capital and was going to spend it on privatizing Social Security. Reid and his close ally, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, mobilized to ensure if Bush were going to be profligate with his illusory capital, they would ensure he went bankrupt in more ways than one.

Reid knew he had problems within his own caucus, with some members likely to go rogue. His team had the foresight to have built a bridge to progressives by hiring Ari Rabin Havt, who had relationships in the then-burgeoning blogosphere.

Reid employed his newly formed war room to pummel Bush at events and photo ops, and Rabin-Havt helped keep the caucus in line. As I write in the book:

So they had events and photo ops, but they also were working behind the scenes with bloggers, with Reid occasionally directing Rabin-Havt to have his friends in the blogosphere publicly go after a wobbly Democratic

member. And then he would inform his besieged colleague that Rabin-Havt could soothe the bloggers so long as that Democratic senator would reaffirm

his or her opposition to privatization.

This was “Reid to his core, because it was this very tactical thing where he knew we had to hold these people, and he would just trade whatever he wanted to hold these people,” Rabin-Havt said.

Bush’s effort not only failed, his approval ratings cratered, allowing the Democrats to win smashing victories a year later that gave them control of Congress and elevated Reid to majority leader and Pelosi to speaker. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

“He was the guy that led Dems out of the darkness in ‘06 with the Social Security fight,” said one Democrat who was there. “He would have done it again with ACA/health care in ‘26.”

Perhaps.

But one thing is certain: If Rosen or Cortez Masto were his partner in the Senate, they would have voted with Reid from Day one of the shutdown. He wouldn’t have had it any other way.