Majority of Americans Blame Trump for Shutdown, Polls Find

Last month, President Trump said he would be “proud” to shut down the government if Democrats didn’t vote for a federal budget that included money for a U.S.-Mexico border wall. “I will be the one to shut it down,” he said in a Dec. 11 meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Ten days later, he abandoned that promise. In a video tweet, Trump said, “Call it a Democrat shutdown. Call it whatever you want.” Now, 24 days into the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, a new poll suggests that despite his attempts at deflection, most Americans blame the president.

Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed say they believe Trump is at least partially responsible, according to the latest HuffPost/YouGov tracking poll—an increase from the 49 to 51 percent who said the same thing in the early weeks of the shutdown. And the longer the shutdown continues, the more those polled see it as a danger. The portion of respondents who believe the shutdown is “very serious” jumped to 50 percent last week, up from 29 percent in the version of the survey taken right before Christmas.

A quarter of respondents believe that the shutdown will affect them personally, but reports of missed paychecks for federal workers make the harm feel real. As one respondent from Arizona explained, “[Our son] is an essential federal worker with a 1-year-old and no way to buy diapers or baby food.”

Two other recent polls found similar results, in terms of whom Americans blame for the shutdown.

A CNN/SSRS poll found that 55 percent of those surveyed named Trump as responsible, while 32 percent blamed congressional Democrats. Another poll by ABC and The Washington Post found 53 percent blame the president.

In terms of partisan divides among those surveyed, CNN reports that “Democrats are more unified in their blame for the president (89 percent blame Trump) than the Republican rank-and-file are in blaming the Democrats (65 percent of Republicans blame the Democrats in Congress, 23 percent blame Trump).”

Democrats are not off the hook, however: Respondents in the HuffPost/YouGov poll indicate they believe both sides are handling the situation poorly, even as they assign more blame to Trump (44 percent of respondents believe Democrats are at least somewhat responsible). In addition, more Americans believe that Republicans are choosing politics over the needs of the American people in allowing the shutdown to continue.

As Ariel Edwards-Levy writes in HuffPost, “Americans say by a 23-point margin that Republicans are playing politics rather than working in good faith to end the shutdown. They say the same of Trump by a 19-point margin and of Democrats by a 14-point margin.”

Americans, the HuffPost/YouGov poll indicates, also are not a fan of Congress in general:

Americans are 45 percentage points likelier to disapprove than to approve of the performance by Congress as a whole. They disapprove of congressional Republicans by a 29-point margin, of Trump by a 17-point margin and of congressional Democrats by a 13-point margin. Members of the public are close to evenly split on how they feel about the performance of their own representatives.

The political implications of the shutdown remain unclear. Edwards-Levy called shutdown effects in the recent past “ephemeral,” adding, “The 2013 government shutdown sent ratings for the Republican Party falling to historic lows, but faded quickly from public memory and didn’t prevent the GOP from claiming victory in the midterms a year later.”