There were a lot of Democrat voters (or maybe just a few very loud ones idk) that blamed the rise of Donald Trump 2: Judgement Day on liberals and leftists that did not vote for Harris. Their logic, iiuc, was that everyone should vote for Harris even if they think it’s wrong, because the alternative is worse. How are those people feeling about the government shutdown? Should the Democrats in the government have voted for the Republican proposed budget, just to keep the government running? Now there will be tens of thousands of government employees that will not get paid, which would not have happened had the budget passed and the government remained open. What would have been the correct course of action for the Democrats in the government?
Letting the government shut down is literally the only point of leverage the Dems have. This is them actually doing something for the first time in almost a year of Trump 2.0.
The alternative is just letting all the cuts the want to make in this budget go through uncontested in a complicit abdication to the fascist, patently betraying their constituency (even more than they already largely have).