Republicans are feeling pretty smug these days about brokering a deal with Democrats to reopen the government without much other than a loose agreement to allow a vote on immigration issues. Voters, on the other hand, aren’t so impressed with Republicans’ governing skills. Politico writes:
According to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll conducted Saturday and Sunday, a combined 48 percent of voters said Trump (34 percent) and Republicans in Congress (15 percent) were to blame for the shutdown — more than the 35 percent who said congressional Democrats bore most of the blame.
And a majority of voters, 53 percent, thought President Donald Trump hadn’t done enough to bring the parties together — compared to only 29 percent who thought Trump had done enough.
Got that? Voters held Republicans responsible by a 13-point margin and most Americans thought Trump was pretty useless (Jell-Oey, shall we say?). Despite the media's fixation on Democrats "blocking" the spending bill, voters seem pretty clear about who's running the government and who's responsible when Congress fails to keep the lights on. That's worth keeping in mind when February 8, the next deadline, rolls around.
And so is this: the poll also found that support for a shutdown over DACA went up five points, while voters who didn’t support a shutdown over DACA fell by four points.
"As Democrats consider their next move, our polling shows an uptick in voter support for shutting down the government over protections for 'Dreamers,'" said Morning Consult co-founder and Chief Research Officer Kyle Dropp. "In a poll taken before the shutdown, 42 percent of voters said this issue was important enough to prompt a government shutdown, compared with 47 percent of voters who say the same today."
Fewer voters, 38 percent, say DACA is not important enough to shut down the government — down from 42 percent immediately before the shutdown.
How about funding for Trump’s border wall? The only people on board with shutting down the government over that is the predictable 30 percent of Trump bitter-enders.
...significantly fewer voters say it’s worth shutting down the government to secure funding for Trump’s main immigration priority: a wall along the Mexican border. Fewer than three-in-10 voters, 29 percent, say a border wall is worth shutting down the government over, while 57 percent say the wall isn’t worth it.
Wasn’t Mexico gonna pay for that? Hard to imagine how that deal tanked with Trump running point.