September 23, 2013

Americans Claim to be Equally Divided on Who to Blame for Government Shutdown


According to Pew, the public will blame Republicans and President Obama about equally if there’s a government shutdown. I suppose this is good news for Republicans, though I’d be really interested in seeing the party breakdown on this question, since I’ll bet it’s basically a proxy for party affiliation and not much else. This seems especially likely since only 25 percent of those polled even say they’re following the shutdown fight “very closely.” Of the remaining 75 percent, only 7 percent answered “don’t know” on the blame question. So what are they basing their answers on?

UPDATE: Michael Dimock passes along the partisan breakdown. No surprise on the D/R front, but it turns out that independents say they’d blame Obama more than Republicans by a margin of 39-33 percent. I’ll confess that this startles me. I’m not sure what to make of it.

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

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