No. of Recommendations: 6
A plurality of Americans blamed the republicans and Trumpedo for the shutdown, and every week the polling got a little worse for them. And Americans were just beginning to pay attention to this issue and the inability of republicans to govern.I'm not sure why that leads you to disagree with me. Because even if the above were true, there was no reason to think it was going to change the GOP's position. A plurality blamed the GOP and Trump; a plurality
also blamed the Democrats. Because the split was (roughly) 1/3 - 1/3 - 1/3 (with the last 1/3 blaming both). Slightly more voters blamed the GOP than the Republicans, but there were not nearly enough who blamed just the GOP for this to put any pressure on the GOP to move.
Plus, whatever movement in the polls was happening was
slight. Opinion's barely moved since the beginning - a few points against GOP congresscritters after a month.
A YouGov survey released Friday found 32 percent of respondents blame Democrats for the shutdown, while 35 percent fault Republicans and 28 percent say both parties are equally responsible.
The share of the blame placed on Republicans, though, has dropped by 4 percentage points since YouGov last asked the question in mid-October, while the percentage blaming both sides equally has increased by 4 points.
But over the past month, net approval for how parties are handling the shutdown has worsened for both President Trump (-21 to -27) and congressional Republicans (-23 to -27). Net approval for congressional Democrats has stayed low but mostly unchanged (-25 to -26) since October, according to YouGov.https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/559706...Opinion's been pretty constant on the point since the beginning of the shutdown, and Democrats were not going to be able to hold out for
months.
Trumpedo was collapsing and democrats bailed him out.How was he collapsing? His approval ratings were taking a hit, to be sure - but still higher than most of his first term. And he showed absolutely no signs of caring one whit about it. He doesn't ever have to run again for election. He doesn't care about getting anything through Congress. He doesn't care whether government services are being provided - that's not his priority, and not what he cares about. The shutdown gave him cover to do some RIF'ing
and gives him a ready-made excuse if the economy slows as the tariffs start to bite.
And democrats got nothing in this bargain. Zip. This "deal" was on offer weeks ago and this vague promise to hold some vote sometime in December is hilarious. Lucy is really going to let Charlie Brown kick the football this time. She really means it.I agree it's very little. It's not nothing - part of the perks of being the majority is that you control the agenda and get to protect your members from difficult votes (and get to deprive the opposing party of votes they want). So even though the vote will almost certainly fail (and even if it succeeded, the proposal would die in the House), the Democrats want to have the vote so they can point to it when they blame the GOP for the ACA subsidy termination during the midterms.
