Americans are largely ready to see President Donald Trump and the GOP move on from their pursuit of a border wall, according to a HuffPost/YouGov survey conducted after the end of the government shutdown.
Just 37 percent of Americans polled said Trump and the GOP should keep working to pass a bill that funds a wall on the border with Mexico, while 54 percent said they want to see Republicans turn their attention to other issues. But those surveyed said they’re not entirely optimistic the government will avoid further gridlock: 72 percent said it’s at least somewhat likely that there will be another government shutdown within a month,
Respondents gave negative ratings to everyone in Washington for the shutdown, with disapproval of Congress’ performance 41 percentage points higher than approval. The public also gave negative net ratings to congressional Republicans (–25), Trump (–19) and, by a lesser margin, Democrats in Congress (–8) and their own representatives (–5).
More than 80 percent of Hillary Clinton voters said they approved of Democrats’ handling of the shutdown ― a change from the shutdown a year ago, when barely more than half said the same. Nearly two-thirds said Democrats compromised about the right amount in resolving the shutdown.
Forty percent of Trump voters said the president compromised too much, while another 40 percent said that he compromised about the right amount and 9 percent that he compromised too little. The rest said they were unsure.
But that doesn’t appear to have significantly dampened their view of the president’s performance. Eighty-four percent of Trump voters approved of his handling of the shutdown, with 70 percent strongly approving. Remarkably, his approval numbers are close to identical among those who said he compromised too much and those who said he compromised the right amount.
Seventy percent of Trump voters said they expect the president to succeed in eventually funding a border wall, with an additional 9 percent saying he has already done so. Eighty-three percent said they want him to keep working to do so, with only 12 percent saying that he should move on to other issues.
Few other post-shutdown polls have yet been released. But in a Monmouth University survey published Monday, 32 percent of Americans surveyed said that the resolution to the shutdown made Trump look weaker, 24 percent that it made him look stronger and 41 percent that it had no effect.
“Despite what was objectively a climbdown in Trump’s position, these poll results provide more evidence that public opinion of the president has been largely baked in since day one,” Patrick Murray, Monmouth’s polling director, said in a statement. “The needle may move, but it does not move all that much.”
Use the widget below to further explore the results of the HuffPost/YouGov survey, using the menu at the top to select survey questions and the buttons at the bottom to filter the data by subgroups:
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted Jan. 25 to 27 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
HuffPost has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. More details on the polls’ methodology are available here.
Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some but not all potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.