The protracted US government shutdown is starting to take a toll on Donald Trump’s standing among voters, as both sides dig in for an entrenched battle they feel they can ill-afford to lose.
The president’s approval ratings have drooped in recent weeks as a majority of voters blamed him for a shutdown that he openly embraced in December in a bid to secure funding for his barrier on the southern border.
Yet strategists say the border wall has become such a totemic dividing line in US politics that neither Mr Trump nor Democratic politicians, led by House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in the Senate, can easily give way on the topic. Polling by the Pew Research Center this week showed how hostile both advocates and opponents of the wall are to giving any ground over the barrier in a bid to reopen the government.
Nearly 90 per cent of Americans who oppose an expansion of the border wall say Congress should not pass a bill including Mr Trump’s request for wall funding if it is the only way to end the shutdown. Of those who back the wall, nearly three-quarters find it equally unacceptable for a deal to exclude wall funding.
One Republican policy analyst said: “Both sides have backed themselves into a negotiating trap. The president’s pain threshold is very high. Can you imagine a more dramatic face-losing exercise for the president than exiting the shutdown without any victory on the wall? This is his most iconic campaign promise.”
With the shutdown now in its fourth week, attempts in the Senate to mobilise a bipartisan effort to fund the government have faltered. Kevin Hassett, the chairman of Mr Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, said the shutdown was proving more economically damaging than he had previously estimated.
In a call this week, Mr Hassett accused Democrats of failing to respond to Republican overtures. “The president and the team, they made an offer, a good offer, and a reasonable offer,” he said. “They have not received a counter offer.”
Andrew Surabian, a Republican strategist and former Trump White House official, said the administration could not afford to cave in to the Democrats. “It’s short-term pain for a potential long-term victory,” he said. “There is not going to be a single voter in two years who votes against Trump because 20 per cent of the government shut down for a month or two.”
Yet Mr Trump’s own standing has suffered as a result of a shutdown that he said last year he would be “proud” to engineer in order to clinch funding of more than $5bn for his barrier on the southern border.
Disapproval ratings of the president among registered or likely voters are the highest in about a year at 54.5 per cent, according to a poll tracker from Fivethirtyeight.com. A Quinnipiac University poll released this week showed 63 per cent of voters opposed shutting the government to force wall funding, as opposed to 32 per cent in favour. Some 56 per cent of voters said Mr Trump and Republicans in Congress were responsible for the shutdown, while 36 per cent said Democrats were responsible.
“The shutdown, I think, further burnishes Trump’s image as a figure of chaos, and I don’t think most Americans think it’s for the good of the country to have a chaos president,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster.
“The polling is pretty clear that the vast majority of Americans don’t think it’s appropriate to shut down the government over a border wall, and have taken the position that Pelosi and Schumer have taken that the government should be reopened as issues of border security get hashed out.”
Patrick McHenry, a senior Republican congressman from North Carolina and the ranking member of the House financial services committee, insisted that within his party there was “exceedingly broad agreement that we stand with the president”, with only a handful of Republican lawmakers unwilling to give him additional time to negotiate.
He said in an interview that there was a “clear path forward” on how to end it, which required bipartisan will — something he claimed was lacking on the Democrats’ side. But he added: “You would be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t want this partial government shutdown to end.”
The bet among Democratic advisers is that the economic and political pain associated with the shutdown will eventually prompt enough Republican senators to return to Senate leader Mitch McConnell and ask for a new shot at a funding bill. Efforts in the Senate have focused on a short-term funding bill that would provide breathing room for a broader compromise — but as one Republican aide put it, these still appear “aspirational”.
“The feeling in the GOP is they can’t control the president, and they will hit their pain threshold on the shutdown before he does,” said the Republican policy analyst.
Recommended
US government shutdown
Government shutdown begins to harm US economy
Yet even Republicans who have been less supportive of the president’s policies said they believed Mr Trump would ultimately pay a lower political cost than the current narrative suggested.
Doug Heye, a Republican strategist and former Hill staffer, recalled that congressional Republicans had also been blamed in public opinion polls for the 2013 shutdown, but paid no cost for it in the 2014 midterms. “We were very nervous in leadership at the time that the political ramifications on election day could be serious,” Mr Heye recalled.
Instead, the shutdown “had no electoral impact on Republicans”, he said allowing the party to increase its majority in the House and take back control of the Senate.
“The polling data indicates people are blaming President Trump more than they are blaming the Democrats, but that is today,” said Peter Brown at the Quinnipiac University poll. “The final political verdict will await some kind of settlement”.
