President Donald Trump has already started framing a potential government shutdown as the singular fault of Democrats demanding liberal immigration policies at the expense of border security.

But Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, as well as veterans of past budget battles and campaigns, say that argument isn’t likely to fly — not while the GOP runs the House, Senate and White House and a deeply unpopular president sits in the Oval Office.


“The perception of most Republicans is that a shutdown does not accrue to Republican benefit. It’s a relatively tough sale,” Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) said in an interview. “It makes it that much harder for Democrats to acquiesce on a deal because they feel like they have the upper hand.”

The last time federal agencies shuttered, in 2013, Democrats controlled the Senate and White House. But with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and fellow conservatives pushing for a shutdown in order to whack funding for Obamacare — a popular cause among the Republican base, but not beyond — the GOP could not escape blame in the public eye.

During the 17-day shutdown of 2013, “the Republican Party’s favorable rating dropped 10 points in a matter of days, and it took a year to fully recover,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP pollster. “It would take an act of extraordinary political agility to avoid a similar fate today.”

This year, Democrats hold none of Washington’s levers of power, but their central goal in the immigration talks — protections for undocumented individuals brought to the country as minors — is viewed favorably by bipartisan majorities. Trump is mired in low approval ratings, even in battleground states he won in 2016, as he pushes for more money for the border wall he promised on the campaign trail.

And new polling suggests voters are already poised to blame Republicans if talks go awry. A poll released Tuesday by the Democratic-leaning firm Hart Research Associates found 81 percent of voters in a dozen Trump-leaning states supportive of adding aid to the undocumented Dreamers to any government funding bill.

That leaves Democrats with a significant strategic advantage, knowing that Republicans need their votes to keep the government open and would have trouble laying blame for a shutdown in their laps.

But even though they’re privately confident they have the upper hand, Democrats don’t know for sure how it would play. The public supports Dreamers in the abstract, but would that support hold if the cost were a government shutdown?

That unpredictability, especially for a slate of Democratic incumbents up for reelection in states that Trump carried, could make it doubly difficult for party leadership to force a closure. With the midterm elections lining up in Democrats’ favor, the risk of upsetting the playing field might prove too great.

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There are other wild cards. For the first time in eight years, Republicans will have a president with a bully pulpit to amplify their message. Former Trump campaign aide and veteran GOP operative Barry Bennett vowed that Democrats would face voters’ wrath if they decide block a spending bill over inaction on Dreamers.

“The side that holds out over the least popular issue loses,” Bennett said. “In ’95 we were holding firm on cutting welfare and budget cuts. Our ideas won the day, but we got blamed as the obstructionist. We didn’t control the presidency and therefore the microphone.”

One former Democratic aide, speaking candidly on condition of anonymity, recalled that the blame the public laid at Republicans’ feet for the 2013 shutdown fight didn’t stop them from winning back the Senate in 2014.

“There might be this wish to suggest that this is going to hurt them at the ballot box … that didn’t happen the last time,” the aide said.

Another reason Democrats aren’t pre-emptively charging into a pre-shutdown blame game is reluctance within their own ranks to pick a fight over aid for undocumented immigrants. Despite the global outrage that followed Trump’s alleged reference to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” last week, moderate and Trump-state Democrats are loath to even entertain withholding their votes for a stopgap spending bill.

And with the notoriously mercurial president sending mixed signals about what he wants in an immigration deal, Democratic leaders know they won’t secure any agreement by alienating their congressional GOP counterparts.

Brian Fallon, a former spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer who’s now a senior adviser to the super PAC Priorities USA Action, said “I can understand” why the New York Democrat “would not want to be going around crowing why they have all the leverage … because he’s got to give Republicans some ability to save face.”

“They’ve got to let a very moody, rash president come around,” Fallon added in an interview. “So it’s smart of Schumer not to be going around, puffing his chest, acting like he holds all the cards.”

But leading Democrats were confident in one sentiment as Friday’s government funding deadline drew near: Republicans, and Trump, should fear being blamed for a shutdown enough that they start taking the Senate’s bipartisan immigration deal more seriously.

“This is a president who could choose to make deals,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) told reporters Tuesday. “If the great deal maker can’t do a deal when you control the House and Senate, that’s a massive failure on his part and any government shutdown is a reflection on his leadership.”

Off the Hill, some Republicans were inclined to agree.

“If there is a shutdown, GOP will — and should — get blame,” tweeted Doug Heye, a former senior congressional aide and Republican National Committee spokesman.