Last Tuesday’s off-year elections have altered the shutdown fight, just not in the way many on Capitol Hill had hoped.

Heading into last week, lawmakers on both sides had felt glimmers of optimism that they were on a path to dissolving the budget impasse. Centrist senators in both parties were negotiating over a potential spending compromise, and observers predicted that the Nov. 4 elections would grease the skids for a quick reopening of the government.

Just the opposite happened.

After Tuesday’s blue wave, Democrats feel they have the political winds at their backs, which has empowered them to dig in on their demand that health care subsidies be a part of any deal to end the shutdown.

Congressional Republicans are digging in, as well, insisting they won’t negotiate over health care, or anything else, until the government is reopened.

And President Trump hasn’t helped bridge the gap. Since the elections, he’s continued to reject the Democrats’ entreaties to launch bipartisan talks, instead urging GOP senators to end the shutdown through the strictly partisan maneuver of eliminating the Senate filibuster — an idea that even most Republicans in the Capitol oppose.

The combination has heightened tensions between Republicans and Democrats, who are as far apart as they’ve been at any point during the shutdown, and muddled the path to an eventual resolution. Indeed, by the end of last week, the nascent Senate deal that had been under discussion just days earlier had collapsed.

That breakdown became evident after a Senate Democratic lunch on Thursday, when even the centrist Democrats involved in the talks signaled they were........

© The Hill