How many times have democrats voted to keep the government shut down

1. The competing tallies that drive confusion — five, thirteen, fourteen and why numbers diverge

News outlets and partisan statements present different counts because they count different procedural moments. A Republican leadership summary asserts Democrats have voted five times against a clean continuing resolution, a tally advanced to argue Democratic responsibility for the shutdown ^[1]. Independent news reporting, however, characterizes successive Senate defeats to advance a House-passed stopgap as the 13th or 14th failed attempt to move funding, language that reflects Senate cloture and procedural votes rather than a single “yes/no” final passage tally ^{[2] [3]}. The disparity arises from whether one counts only votes explicitly rejecting a clean CR, each distinct cloture motion, or the number of successive roll-call attempts to move a particular House bill. Each method produces a different headline number without changing the underlying fact that multiple Senate attempts failed to secure the 60 votes needed to advance funding.

2. What the mainstream reporting documents — repeated Senate failures to advance House bills

Mainstream outlets document a string of Senate roll calls in which a House-passed continuing resolution repeatedly failed to reach 60 votes to advance, described in reporting as the 13th and then the 14th such failure; these accounts place the blame on an inability to attract Democratic defectors to reach cloture thresholds while also noting some Democrats were negotiating conditional support ^{[3] [2]}. Reporting highlights that no new Democrats crossed the aisle in the most recent failed votes, while a small number of moderates have been involved in private talks to find a compromise. These pieces emphasize procedural dynamics — cloture thresholds, amendments, and negotiations over policy riders — rather than framing the outcome solely as an ideological shutdown vote.

3. Republican leadership narratives and their political purpose

Statements from Republican leaders and allied analysis frame the question as Democrats having “voted five times to shut down the government,” a political narrative meant to assign responsibility and press public opinion against Democrats ^[1]. This framing selects a particular subset of votes — typically clean CR rejections — while omitting the broader sequence of procedural attempts or the content of alternative bills Democrats proposed. The messaging goal is clear: create a simple culpability metric for voters. Factually, the five-vote claim is a verifiable count if one adopts the specific definition promoted by Republican leadership, but it is not the only defensible way to count related roll calls.

4. Evidence that Democrats sometimes voted to reopen or did support funding measures

Reporting also records instances where Democrats supported funding measures to avoid shutdowns in other contexts, underscoring that Democratic voting behavior has not been uniform across sessions and chambers ^{[4] [5]}. A December House vote showed broad Democratic support for a particular spending measure, and several moderate Democratic senators engaged in negotiations and were reported as willing to back opening the government under specific conditions. These facts show the binary claim that Democrats uniformly voted to keep the government shut is inaccurate; voting patterns changed with bill text, chamber, and negotiated concessions.

5. The policy stakes that drove Democratic votes — leverage over health credits and program extensions

Democratic leaders and senators framed their resistance to certain GOP-passed measures as leveraging votes to secure policy priorities such as extensions of health insurance tax credits and protections for federal programs, making their procedural opposition less an abstract refusal and more a bargaining tactic ^{[6] [7]}. Coverage explains both parties traded claims: Republicans demanded Democrats first vote to reopen government before negotiating, while Democrats sought commitments on policy items before providing votes. These strategic differences help explain repeated failed votes and why counting “votes to keep the government shut” without context obscures the substantive policy negotiations driving the impasse.

6. Bottom line: one number doesn’t capture the complexity — read the tally alongside the counting rule

The factual takeaway is that different, legitimate counting methods produce different numbers: some outlets or leaders report five formal Democratic rejections of a clean CR, while news coverage of cloture/advancement attempts documents a longer sequence of 13–14 failed votes to advance the House bill ^{[1] [2] [3]}. Accurate public understanding requires specifying which votes are being counted — final passage rejections, cloture failures, or successive attempts — and accounting for bipartisan votes in other measures where Democrats supported reopening. Without that clarity the question reduces to partisan talking points rather than a precise record of procedural actions.