President Donald Trump’s voters still expect him to build a border wall and hand Mexico the bill, according to a poll taken largely before the latest shutdown controversy began brewing.





Sixty-three percent of voters who supported Trump in the 2016 election believe that he is likely to fulfill his campaign promise to build the wall, a new survey finds, with just 22% believing he’s unlikely to do so. Another 4% believe the wall has already been built, while the remainder is unsure. Their level of confidence has remained largely stable over polls taken the past two years.





Trump voters say it’s important to build the wall: Thirty-nine percent list it among the three promises they most want to see the president fulfill, tying it with “draining the swamp” for first place.





This means for the wall’s importance to Trump’s political future is debatable. It suggests that the rhetoric around its construction remains powerfully motivational to his base. But it also suggests that as long as Trump continues to press the issue, his voters may well believe it remains a possibility.





Another part of the survey offers one hint to what might happen if Trump abandoned his quest for the wall. In September of last year, about half of his voters said repealing the Affordable Care Act was a top priority, and 81% expected him to deliver. But as Republicans largely abandoned the idea , the importance Trump voters placed on it faded as well. In the most recent poll, only 47% expect the president to achieve a repeal of the health law (another 15% now believe that he already has). But only a third now say that his doing so is especially important. Trump voters’ fervor for the wall, in other words, may to some extent reflect the attention that the White House currently lavishes on the idea.





Seven hundred days into Trump’s presidency, his voters have largely moved from expecting him to fulfill his campaign promises to believing that he already has done that. 56% of Trump voters now say he has lived up to most of what he promised, and another 36% say that he’s likely to do so. The first group is dominated by staunch Republicans, and more likely to identify as “strongly conservative;” the second group is somewhat less vehemently ideological or tethered to the party.