Poll: Majority of Americans hold Trump and Republicans responsible for shutdown

A majority of Americans place the blame for the record-long partial government shutdown at President Trump and congressional Republicans’ feet, according to a Washington Post–ABC News poll published Friday.

About 58 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Trump is doing, while 37 percent approve, marking a 5 percent uptick in the president’s disapproval rating since the same poll in November, which was released just before Democrats won the majority in the House of Representatives.

{mosads}A majority, 53 percent, of Americans also blame Trump and congressional Republicans for the shutdown, which entered its 35th day Friday. Another 34 percent blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and congressional Democrats, while 10 percent blamed both parties.

Trump announced Friday afternoon that he had reached a deal to end the shutdown.

The poll is just the latest in a string of surveys that suggest the White House and its allies on Capitol Hill are losing the messaging war over the government’s closure.

About a quarter of the government shut down on Dec. 22, when funding for a number of agencies lapsed. Around 800,000 federal employees were furloughed or required to work without pay, causing cancellations at airports and heightened absences of federal employees from their jobs.

More than 1 in 5, 22 percent, of Americans said in the poll they had personally been inconvenienced by the shutdown.

Friday’s poll came out before Trump announced a deal that would open the government for three weeks while Democrats and Republicans negotiate their disagreements over border security and Trump’s desired border wall in a bipartisan conference committee.

The closure largely revolved around Trump’s and congressional Democrats’ refusal to budge for more than a month on adding $5.7 billion dollars for a border wall in a spending bill. 

However, while 54 percent of the poll’s respondents agreed that the U.S. was doing “too little” to “keep undocumented immigrants from coming into this country,” only 42 percent supported building a border wall, suggesting that many did not believe Trump’s demands for the funds were worth shutting down the government.

Those numbers matched the same poll’s results from two weeks ago.

The poll surveyed 1,001 adults from Jan. 21 to 24 and has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.