A majority of registered voters believe that Republicans will win the shutdown fight, a survey from Harvard-Harris found.
The survey asked respondents, “Who do you think will win the government shutdown — the Democrats or the Republicans?”
Across the board, 62 percent said Republicans will win the shutdown fight, while just 38 percent expressed confidence that Democrats will emerge victorious.
Republicans are overwhelmingly confident that they will win — 92 percent — and most independents, 62 percent, also believe Republicans will emerge as the victors.
However, 70 percent of Democrats believe they will win the shutdown battle, as Democrats are famously refusing to agree to maintain current spending levels over COVID-era subsidies, turning this into a healthcare battle — something Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said is misleading on the part of the Democrats, as those are two separate issues.
“I want you to look at the real facts,” Johnson said during a Monday press conference, explaining that Republicans passed a simple stop gap measure to “keep the lights on and keep the government open so that appropriators can finish this very healthy process for the people they represent.”
“Why do we say it’s clean? Because there’s nothing to it. It’s 24 pages. It’s the bare minimum. It just says, keep the status quo,” he said, explaining that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is essentially turning this into a healthcare battle to save face with the far-left sect of his party.
“They created a red herring. A red herring is a distraction. They decided that they would pick a fight on health care. Let me look right into the camera and tell you very clearly, Republicans are the ones concerned about health care,” Johnson clarified, later adding, “There’s a lot of thoughtful debate and discussion that has already been going on about that, and will go on about it, but that’s a December 31 issue.”
“So, Chuck Schumer is scrambling. He has to have an issue,” he said, making it clear that — despite the left’s narrative — these are two separate issues.
“They’re two totally separate things. The clean continuing resolution would simply keep the lights on so that the members in the House and Senate can have those debates on health care. We were always planning it. We have lots of ideas on the table on how to fix it, but we don’t yet have consensus on it because it’s very complicated,” he added. “We have time to do it.”
The survey was taken October 1-2, among 2,413 registered voters. It has a +/- 1.99 percent margin of error.
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