At the time of publication, the federal government shutdown is in its 14th Day and is unlikely to end anytime soon. Congressional Republicans have refused to negotiate with their Democratic counterparts regarding their demands to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire on December 31st. Neither side seems particularly willing to budge as leaders in both parties are banking on a combination of factors, and in large part public opinion, into pressuring the other side into caving. In prior shutdowns, the battle over public opinion has been defined by the “blame game” - who Americans blame more in the midst of an ongoing government shutdown. However, this time is different, as the public is, for the first time, at least somewhat in favor of shutting down the government to achieve a policy goal. 

Since the shutdown began on October 1st, we’ve tracked four different polls asking Americans for their opinions on the shutdown, and who they blame the most for it occurring. In all four polls, a clear plurality or a majority of Americans blame President Trump and Republicans for the shutdown, and a smaller minority blame Democrats. This ratio of blame may feel familiar, because it is. In every major government shutdown since 1995, the public has tended to blame Republicans more than Democrats. Why is this? Are Republicans just worse at navigating the messaging of a shutdown fight, or are there other factors at play? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. But it is worth exploring the contours of prior shutdown fights to see how and why they resulted in Republicans losing the blame game each time.

The concept of the federal government shutting down due to a funding lapse is a relatively new addition to US politics. After a series of funding gaps during the Carter administration, President Carter’s attorney general, Benjamin Civiletti, issued legal opinions that required federal agencies to suspend non-essential operations during a funding lapse. Ever since Civiletti issued his two opinions, there have been a total of ten federal shutdowns due to an inability of Congress to appropriate funds before the start of the new fiscal year. 

However, no shutdown had ever extended more than 5 days until 1995, when sparring between President Clinton and the Newt Gingrich-led Republican Congress resulted in a shutdown that lasted 3 full weeks, which was enough to meaningfully register as the first “major” shutdown. It came following a “minor” shutdown just a month earlier that lasted five days, over many of the same issues, and which had ended in a temporary funding bill that failed to lead to any sort of permanent agreement before the next deadline. President Clinton kicked off the extended shutdown when he vetoed a Republican spending bill that would have slashed funding for social programs, divvied up control of Medicaid across state agencies, and cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans. 

Speaker Gingrich did himself no favors politically during these two shutdowns when he implied to a reporter that his refusal to work with Clinton was in part because the President had “snubbed” him while on a flight to Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral. This was an obvious gaffe, and in a time when these sorts of statements seemed to matter much more than they do today, it may have had a real effect on public perceptions of this shutdown. Two polls at the time found that a clear plurality of Americans blamed congressional Republicans for the shutdown more than they blamed President Clinton, and this atmosphere would eventually lead Republicans to largely cave and pass the President’s proposed budget with no major alterations. 

The next major shutdown would not occur until 2013, when Republicans in control of Congress once again refused to pass a budget under a Democratic President. Unlike in 1995-96, Republicans only controlled the House, not the Senate. The tea party members of the Republican house caucus would largely drive this shutdown over the Affordable Care Act, with many seeing it as a chance to at least partially defund or delay its long-term implementation. Despite the ACA being seen as unpopular by a near-majority of Americans at the time, the general consensus that emerged from this 16-day shutdown was that congressional Republicans had once again failed to meaningfully convince Americans of either the necessity of the shutdown, or that President Obama was largely to blame. In three polls from the time period, Quinnipiac, USA Today, and ABC News all found that Republicans took the lion’s share of the blame for the shutdown, despite President Obama’s approvals hovering in the low 40s for multiple months both before and after. 

A more minor shutdown would occur in 2018, when disputes over DACA resulted in a 3-day shutdown during President Trump’s first term. While a CNN poll from the time found that a shutdown would not be palatable to Americans over the threat of DACA programs being ended, an already embattled President Trump ended up taking the eventual blame, along with his party. An average of 4 different polls at the time from Politico, the Washington Post, Quinnipiac, and the aforementioned CNN poll showed Americans blaming either President Trump or congressional Republicans by a margin of 47-32 over Democrats broadly. 

The 96-hour shutdown in early 2018 would only be a preview of what was to come when, in December 2018, congressional Democrats could not agree on an appropriations bill, leading to what would become the longest shutdown in US history. Stemming from a fight over funding for Trump’s US-Mexico border wall proposal, the 35-day lapse in appropriations would lead to federal workers missing nearly 3 full pay periods. Special attention in this shutdown was paid to Air Traffic Controllers, who began to call in sick at increasingly higher rates as the lapse entered its 5th week, causing the FAA to limit flights at LaGuardia, Newark Liberty, and Philadelphia International airports. This action quickly precipitated the end of the shutdown (and may already be putting significant pressure on lawmakers in 2025) with a temporary stopgap bill re-opening the government for 3 weeks before a veto-proof budget was ultimately passed in both chambers. Just like the earlier shutdowns in 2018, 2013 and 1995, Democrats once again avoided the largest share of blame from the public. An average of 5 polls from the time (YouGov, Reuters/Ipsos, Morning Consult, WaPo, PBS/Marist) shows a 51-32 split between Trump/Republicans and Democrats in terms of blame from the public, but with Trump making up the vast majority of the responses blaming either him or congressional Republicans separately. 

One could assume that based on these four shutdowns, Democrats tend to win the battle of public opinion in the end. While the data bears this out, it’s worth noting that a sample size of four is not necessarily indicative of any real correlation. It is also worth pointing out that of the five that have happened since 1995, three have now happened under Trump, who unlike Presidents Obama and Clinton, has struggled to frame the shutdown as being anything other than his own fault. In an infamous Oval Office meeting with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi right before the start of the 2018-19 shutdown, Trump told Schumer, in a televised national broadcast, “I will take the mantle, I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not gonna blame you for it”, and that he was “proud to shut down the government for border security”, ten days before he would tweet “the Democrats now own the shutdown!” shortly before it began in earnest. 

This time around, Trump has signalled far more willingness (even if this is not true) to negotiate with Democrats, in a move that is causing frustration among congressional Republicans who wish to strike a unified message of refusing to budge on their priorities for the budget. Unfortunately, there is little data on whether Americans blame Trump or congressional Republicans more for the current impasse, with only a Reuters / Ipsos poll posing Trump and congressional Rs as separate options for respondents (37% blame Trump, 19% blame congressional Rs, 37% blame Dems).  Regardless of the change in tone compared to 2018-19, our average of the latest polls (Reuters / Ipsos, YouGov / Economist, CBS News, Washington Post, Harvard/Harris, Navigator Research) still puts most of the blame at the foot of Trump and the Republicans by a margin of 46-32. While respondents to the YouGov poll indicated they wish for lawmakers to compromise in order to end the shutdown by a margin of 63-37, the same question with almost the exact wording on the Reuters/Ipsos poll found a margin of 50-45. When the Washington Post asked this question but framed it around the fight over ACA subsidies, a plurality (47%) of respondents indicated that they support Democratic demands to extend the subsidies even if those demands are causing the present shutdown. In the Navigator poll, respondents were presented with two different questions along these lines. The first asked if they wanted Democrats to compromise and end the shutdown without a message framing, which polled 51-37%. The second asked the same question, but framed specifically around healthcare costs going up if the ACA subsidies are not extended. With that framing, 45% of respondents wanted Democrats to hold their ground, vs 43% who wanted them to compromise.

That last point is important - according to the Washington Post poll, 71% of Americans want the ACA subsidies in question to be extended. When we compare the issue at hand and the party driving that issue to prior shutdowns, some of the data begins to make more sense. A set of polls from November 1995 found that only 28% of respondents supported the demands of congressional Republicans over President Clinton’s insistence on keeping the government open. In 2013, only 34% of respondents to a Quinnipiac poll indicated support for cutting off funding for the implementation of the ACA.  In the 2018-19 shutdown, an average of only 39% of respondents to polls at the time indicated their support for increased border wall funding. All three of those prior motivating factors for the shutdowns in question were driven by Republicans, and all three were broadly unpopular with Americans. That stands in fairly stark contrast to the present shutdown, where Democrats are driving on an issue that they have a clear upper-hand on. Americans tend to associate shutdowns with the issues that drive them, and they tend to blame whichever party supports the less popular position on the issue in question. This is not the only data point that explains trends in which party gets more of the blame for a shutdown, but it is a major one.

Across a broad spectrum, healthcare has polled as one of the strongest issues for Democrats for well over a decade. This is the difference-maker, and a key reason why the overarching strategy of Democrats is to raise the salience of an issue that is likely to benefit them well past this shutdown. Republicans are correct in their belief that Democrats are waiting for outside help to drive their message. But instead of it being thousands of people on Capitol Hill for Saturday’s “No King’s Rally,” it will be healthcare companies sending out millions of letters informing Americans that their premiums are going up. In fact, voters in New Jersey and Virginia will likely be experiencing sticker shock from their premiums doubling or even tripling before they pick up their “I voted stickers” on Election Day. This will be a preview of a topline message for Democrats in the upcoming midterms. If the enhanced healthcare subsidies do expire, costs will increase for a significant portion of the American public, and voters tend to react poorly when an action taken (or not taken) by the party in power directly and adversely affects their pocketbooks. This was never going to be the case for something like DACA. One hits your heart, the other hits your wallet. It is simply easier to make people incorporate a given issue into their voting behavior when it already affects them directly.

There’s a good chance that this shutdown drags on for a while – partly because of how central the issue of healthcare costs is to the overall Democratic message, partly because millions of these premium increase notifications will begin going out when the ACA open-enrollment period starts on November 1st, and partly because top Democrats just can’t seem to trust any deal being offered up from their Republican colleagues. Should the present shutdown extend past the 35-day mark, or begin to have truly detrimental effects on the function of everyday life in the US (Air Traffic Control problems will likely be the impetus of this), there’s a good chance we’ll see the data shift on whether Americans feel their favored political party should stick to their demands or compromise to end the shutdown. The data on who exactly is to blame will remain fluid until the end as well, although there’s no expectation that it will change drastically.

Typically, these shutdown fights do not end up mattering. Pundits speculated that Bill Clinton’s handling of the 1995-96 shutdown may have aided in his successful re-election, but that opinion goes without any real data to back it up. There could be a nugget of truth to this as it was the first “major” shutdown, and the public was incredibly supportive of the President’s position in a way they simply wouldn’t be decades later. By the time the 2014 midterms rolled around, the 2013 shutdown was far in the rearview mirror, and the political debate revolved around a now fully funded Affordable Care Act. The 96-hour shutdown over DACA in January 2018 had virtually no bearing on that year’s midterms, which were already geared around Trump’s tax cuts, failed attempts to kill the ACA, and his general unpopularity. The record-setting 2018-19 shutdown was also completely forgotten before it could affect any major election cycle, and a modern political lifetime (almost 2 years) passed between it and the 2020 election. Assuming this shutdown concludes before the start of the new year, and doesn’t cause any major disasters, the likelihood that the federal funding lapse of 2025 will have any weight on the 2026 midterms is exceedingly low. However, the issue and the messaging at its core is likely to only grow in voters’ minds as we head into the new year – especially if the subsidies expire.

Where the fact of the shutdown itself could have an impact is in New Jersey and Virginia, where elections for Governor and other local/statewide offices are occurring in just over three weeks. New Jersey’s gubernatorial race is only one where a prolonged shutdown could have a meaningful impact as the campaign between Mike Sherril and Jack Ciattarelli has narrowed fairly significantly in recent weeks. But the chances of it mattering when all is said and done is ultimately quite low.

While unlikely, there is a chance that Republicans will end this shutdown without any Democratic votes in Congress. This, of course, would require Senate Republicans to go “nuclear” and kill the procedural filibuster to reopen the government with a simple majority. Beyond a few scattered voices like Bernie Moreno or Marjorie Taylor Greene (who may be on a unique political journey of her own), this does not seem like an idea with real potential at the time of writing. If, however, this shutdown does extend for a significant period of time, who knows? Perhaps, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, will issue a new set of legal opinions that allows the federal government to remain open during lapses in funding. In a second Trump term, virtually anything is on the table.