Polls will now determine when the government shutdown ends
Democrats are winning for now, but they'll cave in a week or two as polling shows that edge eroding.
When you’re one of the Washington, DC bigshots who helps engineer a government shutdown, you strategize with your political allies, do a lot of talking on TV, and then … wait for the polls to arrive.
As Republicans and Democrats blast each other for causing the shutdown, they all know that the one variable that matters is who voters end up blaming. “How quickly an agreement to end the shutdown comes together will depend on … which party voters will blame for the shutdown, according to polls,” Beacon Policy Advisors explained in an October 2 analysis.
To influence the polling, of course, each side is waging a propaganda battle to outshout the other side and make sure voters hear the most convincing argument. Republicans need a handful of Democratic votes in the Senate to pass their spending bill and reopen the government. Democrats won’t provide those votes because the spending bill doesn’t include an extension of health care subsidies due to expire at the end of the year.
Republicans say there’s still time to take up those subsidies in other legislation. But Democrats don’t trust Republicans to do that, plus they think the hype over a shutdown is their best shot to ding the GOP for cutting health care benefits.
President Trump, always on the lookout for opportunities to flog his enemies, has used the shutdown as a pretext for cutting “Democratic agencies,” whatever those might be, and axing thousands of federal workers, possibly permanently. He’s also withholding federal funding for projects in at least 16 states that voted Democratic in the 2024 presidential election, a move meant to punish Democrats for refusing to pass the spending bill he favors.
Is Trump winning? In the polls, that is? Not yet. A Washington Post instapoll conducted the first day of the shutdown found voters blamed Republicans over Democrats by 17 percentage points. That’s similar to a Morning Consult poll from before the shutdown that found 45% of voters would blame Republicans while 32% would blame Democrats.
All of that is before the shutdown has much of an effect and people start listening to what each side has to say. Democrats have an advantage on the substance. Health care is a perennial voter concern, and many voters lump it with economic problems because of high costs.
Health care is one of the few issues where voters trust Democrats more than Republicans. Plus, Democratic talking points on the issue are generally true: If the health subsidies expire at the end of the year, at least 4 million people are likely to lose insurance, while costs skyrocket for millions of others.
Many people trying to understand the shutdown won’t hear the substance, however. Trump and his team excel at flooding the zone with noise that makes it hard to discern meaning. One bogus Trump claim is that Democrats are holding up the spending bill because they want health care subsidies for illegal migrants. The press is busy debunking that, but explaining what’s not true is still a distraction from the message Democrats are trying to get across.
Another Democratic problem: The party basically has no leader, which leaves it to the grating Chuck Schumer, the 74-year-old senator from New York, to be the party’s national spokesmodel advocating for better health care. Schumer is the type of gassy establishmentarian many voters tune out the moment he opens his mouth. One reason the Democrats are less popular than ever is they don’t seem to have anything new to say or anybody new to say it.
Republicans are not going to give the Democrats the health care subsidies they want in the shutdown standoff, no matter how bad the polls get for them. What’s more likely to happen is that the longer the shutdown goes on, the more the Democrats’ position in the polls will erode, at some point forcing them to capitulate. At the end, they’ll congratulate themselves that at least they made their point about health care.
Three Democratic senators have already voted in favor of ending the shutdown, which means it will only take five more to overcome the filibuster, pass the spending bill and end the shutdown. Marginal changes in the polls could be what moves a few remaining Democrats.
“To stave off a wave of moderate defections, Schumer will point to polling that assigned more blame to GOP lawmakers,” Beacon pointed out the day after the shutdown. “Schumer is hoping that polls show similar numbers as the shutdown sets it, but given voters’ historical backlash against the party that forced the shutdown, that may be difficult.”
Republicans don’t have to win the shutdown polling battle, in other words. They just have to lose by a little less.