Thirty-three days after it began, two new polls released Wednesday morning indicate President Donald Trump’s position on the partial government shutdown is less popular than ever and is dragging down his approval rating.
According to a Politico/Morning Consult poll of 1,996 voters conducted from January 18 to 22 with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percent, only 7 percent of voters who oppose the border wall say they back “dedicating funding to a border wall if it was the only way to end the government shutdown,” and more people oppose the wall (49 percent) than support it (43 percent). The unpopularity of Trump’s position suggests Democrats have little reason to cave to Trump’s demand of $5.7 billion for the wall as a condition of reopening the government.
That same poll finds Trump’s disapproval at an all-time high of 57 percent. Notably, Trump’s disapproval among independents — 60 percent — is also at its highest ever.
The Politico/Morning Consult poll finds that a majority of voters — 54 percent — blame Trump and congressional Republicans for the shutdown, compared to 35 percent who blame Democrats.
In a statement, Tyler Sinclair, Morning Consult’s vice president, said, “As the government shutdown enters its second month, President Trump continues to carry the bulk of the blame among voters for the stalemate. … In this week’s poll nearly half of voters (49 percent) say the president is responsible — up 6 points since the shutdown began. At the same time, 35 percent of voters blame congressional Democrats, up 4 points, while 4 percent of voters blame congressional Republicans, down 3 points.”
The second poll, conducted by CBS News, finds that 71 percent of Americans “don’t think the issue of a border wall is worth a government shutdown, which they say is now having a negative impact on the country.”
The poll — conducted by telephone from January 18 to 21 with a random sample of 1,102 adults nationwide — also finds that Americans think House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is doing a better job than Trump at handling the shutdown.
There is a glimmer of positivity for Trump in the CBS poll. It finds that a slight majority of people, 52 percent, want Democrats to agree to a budget that includes wall funding, compared to 43 percent who want Dems to refuse to fund the border wall.
But of particular concern to Trump is the CBS poll’s finding that his base is beginning to fracture over the shutdown, with significant percentages of Republicans now saying the wall isn’t worth it and expressing support for reopening the government without wall funding.
The CBS poll finds that Trump’s approval rating has dipped three points since November, to 36 percent, with an all-time high of 59 percent of Americans now disapproving of the job he’s doing.
CNN’s latest poll of polls also shows Trump’s approval rating dramatically underwater.
Trump’s new favorite poll also contains almost nothing but bad news for him
While the overall picture emerging from the shutdown polling is a bleak one for Trump, over the past week he has repeatedly cherry-picked a single metric from an NPR/PBS/Marist poll showing that his approval rating among Latinos has gone up since last month.
But as I detailed on Tuesday, even that poll contains almost nothing but bad news for Trump. It shows his disapproval rating (45 percent) is the highest it’s been for more than a year, and that a majority of registered voters — 57 percent — say they will definitely vote against him in 2020.
When he’s not promoting cherry-picked metrics from particular polls, Trump has resorted to touting polls that don’t seem to actually exist. Even reliably Trump-friendly polls like Rasmussen currently show that his approval rating is clearly in negative territory.
Although the overall picture emerging from the polling indicates Democrats are winning the argument over the shutdown, Trump’s long-established affinity for cherry-picking suggests he could seize upon CBS’s finding that a slight majority want Democrats to agree to a budget that includes wall funding to make a case that the people are on his side — even if that same poll indicates two-thirds of Americans want him to agree to a budget without wall funding as a way to end the shutdown.
Sourse: vox.com
