Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his tea party boss, Sen. Rand Paul, caught on a hot mic:
PAUL: Do you have a second?
McCONNELL: I'm all wired up here.
PAUL: I just did CNN, and I go over and over again: "We're willing to compromise. We're willing to negotiate." I don't think they've poll-tested "We won't negotiate." I think it's awful for them to say that over and over again. [...] I think if we keep on saying we wanted to defund it, we fought for that, but now we're willing to compromise on this, I think—well, I know we don't want to be hear—but we're going to win this, I think.
First of all, this isn't the kind of thing you need to poll test. It's obvious to everyone but the most partisan Republicans that the GOP is the reason for the shutdown—and that their obsession with Obamacare is the primary culprit. Rand Paul conceded as much when he acknowledged that initially Republicans "wanted to defund it." No amount of wordsmithing will change that fact.
That being said, we actually do have poll data, and despite Paul's optimism, Republicans are getting battered. According to Quinnipiac, just 22 percent of Americans supported shutting down the government over Obamacare. The numbers were a little better for Republicans in a CBS poll, and by little, I really do mean little: In their poll, 25 percent approved of shutting down the government over Obamacare.
If Americans were supportive of—or even divided over—shutting down the government in order to roll back Obamacare, then President Obama would face political pressure to negotiate. But the exact opposite is true: The overwhelming majority of Americans strongly oppose using the threat of government shutdown as leverage to extract concession on Obamacare. If President Obama negotiated, he would be validating a tactic that Americans say they don't want.
Neither McConnell nor Paul seem to realize it, but this is not a battle they are going to win. The bottom line is that most people don't like to see the kind of extortion that Republicans are attempting to carry out. They know that giving into extortionists will just lead to even more extortion. And that's why they won't punish President Obama and Democrats for refusing to be bullied by Republicans—they'll reward it.