Eight days into the government shutdown, Senate Democratic communications directors received a private briefing and a memo from pollster Geoff Garin.
The crux of the message: Stay the course because Democrats are winning the battle of public opinion.
“Voters continue to blame Trump and Republicans more than Democrats for the shutdown,” said the memo, which was obtained by NBC News and featured new polling data conducted by Hart Research, with findings that are backed by other public national surveys on the shutdown fight.
It added that voters are siding with Democrats’ health care funding demands, that Republicans are starting to "feel the heat” on the issue and that the GOP’s political pain will worsen “the longer and more aggressively” Democrats litigate it.
Yeah, there’s a lot more they should be doing, but I’m just elated that for the first time in 2025 they’re doing something. Force the Republicans to capitulate, show people that they don’t have the power or political capital to just do whatever they want and that governing actually requires serving the whole country and not just their narrow supporter base, and then build the case that the modern Republican party is uniquely incapable of doing that.
Regardless of what kind of policy you want, the fact that Republicans are just making a goddamn mess out of everything is going to be undeniable the longer this goes, and there’s a big chunk of the American public that unfortunately doesn’t care about migrants’ human rights or democratic elections or a lot of other stuff I care about, but they do care that their government is a goddamn incompetent mess.