GEOFF BENNETT: The almost government shutdown narrowly avoided a few days ago highlighted a Democratic Party debating how to govern in the minority.

For analysis of that and more, we're joined now by our Politics Monday duo.

That's Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR.

It's good to see you both.

TAMARA KEITH, National Public Radio: Good to be here.

GEOFF BENNETT: Happy St. Patrick's Day.

TAMARA KEITH: Indeed.

GEOFF BENNETT: So many Democratic lawmakers continue to express their deep frustration with Senator Chuck Schumer for having broken with most of his party in allowing this Republican spending bill to pass, as the Democratic base is demanding a stronger resistance to President Trump and his policies.

Here's some of what Democratic lawmakers had to say.

REP. JASMINE CROCKETT (D-TX): The idea that Chuck Schumer is the only one that's got a brain in the room and the only one that can think through all of the pros and cons is absolutely ridiculous.

I think Senate Democrats have to sit down and take a look and decide whether or not Chuck Schumer is the one to lead in this moment.

SEN. CHRIS MURPHY (D-CT): Leader Schumer has a very difficult job.

I don't envy the job that he has.

And the question is really for the members of his Democratic Caucus.

Are we willing to fight?

QUESTION: Do you think that Leader Schumer is the best person to lead your caucus in this moment?

SEN. CHRIS MURPHY: Senator Schumer certainly can lead.

GEOFF BENNETT: And the House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, has refused multiple times to say whether he has confidence in Senator Schumer's leadership.

Tam, walk us through your reporting on this.

TAMARA KEITH: Right.

So Democrats are certainly out in the wilderness right now.

In particular, Washington Democrats are out in the wilderness.

And they face a Democratic electorate that is defeated and depleted.

And if they had won in November, none of this would be happening, but they lost.

And so they're now in these -- this sort of cycle of trying to figure out what they stand for and how to say what they stand for.

I did talk to a Democratic consultant today who said if they would just focus on prices and the economy and the Republicans want to lower taxes on billionaires, they would be fine.

But, instead, there's a lot of focus on a lot of other things.

And this is what happens when you lose.

This is an entirely predictable outcome based on what happened in the election.

GEOFF BENNETT: And, Amy, Senator Schumer canceled a book tour that was set for this week.

His office is citing security reasons.

But in an interview he gave to The New York Times on Saturday, he said that he knew this would be an unpopular decision.

He knew that there would be divisions over this.

But the dissatisfaction isn't just about the vote.

It's about the approach.

Is that right?

AMY WALTER, The Cook Political Report: Yes, I think a lot of this was people feeling, especially on the House side, that they had been caught off guard, right, that there was an agreement that they were going in this together.

Hakeem Jeffries on the House side kept all but one of his members voting no.

Fundamentally, I think Schumer's biggest challenge at this moment is that he's fighting the last war.

And you could hear it in this interview, which is, he's citing examples from 2006 and 2018, when there was also a trifecta of Republican governors, a governorship, right, a Republican president and Republicans in control of Congress, and that the same strategies that worked then are going to work now.

The major difference, even with 2017, is that the Republican Party is so much more unified behind Donald Trump, and he is so much more popular in the districts and states where these members come from.

So I think his fundamental misreading of the moment, of this just specific moment of this government funding bill was that he thought, as did I think many House Democrats, that the speaker would be unable to keep everybody in line, because, again, in the past, in the last wars, they weren't able to do that, and Johnson only had a one-seat margin.

Well, he did it.

And I think that is the theory that they need to be playing now going forward, which is, these Republicans are not going to split away from Donald Trump.

And that is hard.

And that's to tell your voters that, even if all of our people stick together and all of their people stick together, it's not going to work.

GEOFF BENNETT: Well, Democrats at the moment have no real tools with which to fight, given that they're in the minority in both chambers.

And there's also -- this is also playing out in the polling.

The Democratic Party has hit an all-time low in popularity in a new NBC News poll.

Just 27 percent of respondents view the party positively.

For comparison, 39 percent view Republicans positively.

So, Tam, how do the Democrats you speak with, how do they read these numbers?

TAMARA KEITH: Right.

Well, those numbers are pretty terrible all around.

I also looked at another number in underneath the hood of that poll, which is that 65 percent of Democratic voters in that poll want Democrats in Congress to stick to their positions, even if that means not being able to get things done in Washington.

They want Democrats to fight.

The one tool that Democrats in the Senate do have is the filibuster.

The filibuster is still in place.

And there are a lot of people who wanted Schumer and Democrats to do the filibuster, to filibuster, to block it and to and essentially to say, we're headed for a shutdown if you don't play ball with us.

But Schumer, what he is arguing -- and one of the Democrats I talked to today said, well, he may have a point.

What Schumer is arguing is that if they allowed it to shut down, then Musk and Trump would have gotten what they wanted, given that Trump 1.0., so he did a lot of things, but he's doing -- in Trump 2.0, he's cutting, he is doing things, he is blowing past rulings, he is trying novel approaches to the law, you would say.

And the Congress is, the Republican Congress is saying, OK, cool, which means that Democrats are just in a different position than they were before.

AMY WALTER: Yes, and that you can use a filibuster for a different time.

This was not the right time to do it, which is also Schumer's point.

But to that statistic about Democrats wanting Democrats to fight more, in 2017, that number was much lower.

More Democrats said, we want you to work with Trump, not fight him.

But you also have to remember that Democratic voters, and, quite frankly, all voters, have been told throughout 2024 that Donald Trump, by Democrats, that Donald Trump was an existential threat to this country.

If that is your message, if you are saying to people, you have got to come out and vote for Democrats, because, if he wins, he's going to destroy democracy as we know it, and then you go and say, well, actually we can't use a filibuster here to stop somebody that you think is an existential threat.

AMY WALTER: You can understand why Democratic voters are like, I don't understand why you're not fighting more.

Those of us in Washington understand how the politics work, right, in terms of how you get... TAMARA KEITH: And the procedure, yes.

AMY WALTER: And the procedure and how you get numbers or you don't have enough numbers.

But if you run a campaign for the last eight years on that thesis, you're going to have a disappointed base.

GEOFF BENNETT: In meantime, Tam, President Trump continues to see his highest approval ratings ever, according to this same poll.

Again, polling is a snapshot in time.

He's still underwater, but 47 percent approve of the job that he's doing.

And he has a 55 percent approval rating on his handling of immigration.

And the White House is already using polling like this as cover to say that what they're doing on immigration, deporting these Venezuelan migrants without due process, that this is what the American people want and this is what the American people voted for.

TAMARA KEITH: Right.

And Karoline Leavitt tweeted out a video of those Venezuelans on a tarmac in El Salvador and said the American people voted for this.

She said, we are unafraid to double down.

And they are unafraid to double down.

That is exactly what they are doing and they believe that they have a mandate.

GEOFF BENNETT: More to come.

TAMARA KEITH: Yes.

GEOFF BENNETT: Tamara Keith, Amy Walter, thank you both.

AMY WALTER: You're welcome.