Poll Demonstrates Most Americans Blame Trump For Shutdown
Who is to blame for the current government shutdown? While debate among pundits and political observers will differ based on the ideological background of who is casting the blame, for most Americans it is President Donald Trump who is at fault for prolonging the funding crisis.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released earlier on Thursday, nearly half (47 percent) of Americans blame Trump for the shutdown, while only a third of respondents said that Democrats were to blame.
The poll, which was conducted between the dates of December 21-25, asked Americans across the country, mostly after the shutdown started at midnight last Friday, their feelings and attitudes involving the crux of the issue: whether funding for a border wall must be included in any government funding plan going forward, according to reporting from Reuters. Trump has insisted on at least $5 billion to fund the project, and soundly rejected any funding plans prior to last week’s deadline from Congress that could have kept the government fully open until February (without funding for the border wall).
Only a small number of Americans actually want the project to happen, the Reuters/Ipsos poll found out. Just 35 percent of respondents said they’d want to spend $5 billion for the wall, and only a quarter of Americans said they’d be willing to shut down the government in order to force the issue to come about.
More Americans blame Trump than congressional Democrats for the partial government shutdown, a Reuters/Ipsos poll has found, 47-33%.
Just 35% support wall funding in the spending bill. Only 25% support shutting down the government over wall funding.https://t.co/Uh1eHukgsu
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 27, 2018
The funding crisis won’t be resolved anytime soon either, according to reporting from the Washington Post. It appears that the current session of Congress is prepared to do nothing over the matter, preferring to differ to the next session’s leaders when they take office. Democrats are set to control the House of Representatives in the next term, which will be sworn in on January 3.
At that point, it will become even more difficult for Trump to negotiate funding for a border wall being tied to general funding for the government. The Senate, which is currently controlled by Republicans, could not deliver passage of a bill that included border wall funding, which had passed the current Republican-controlled House. With Democrats set to control that chamber in the next session, the odds of border wall funds being passed into law goes down substantially.
The polling from Reuters/Ipsos this week matches what previous polling said about the possibility of a shutdown before it had occurred. Per previous reporting from the Inquisitr, a USA Today/Suffolk University poll had found the week before the shutdown began that most Americans had already determined Trump and Republicans were more at fault for a possible funding crisis than would be Democrats.
