Claim: 27 percent of voters said Democrats should shut down the government if their demands are not met

Question

Ahead of a looming government shutdown, just 27 percent of voters said Democrats should shut down the government if their demands are not met, while 65 percent said they should not. Even among their own party’s voters, Democrats in Congress enjoy only 5 percent net support for their planned funding gambit.

If the government does shut down — an all but certain outcome following an unfruitful meeting between Trump and congressional leaders on Monday — voters said they would be most likely to blame both parties. More voters said they would likely blame Republicans than Democrats (26 percent to 19 percent, respectively), but independents in particular were twice as likely to say Republicans would be to blame, not Democrats.

Answer 1

The claim says that only 27% of voters think Democrats should shut down the government if they don’t get what they want, and that even among Democrats there’s just 5% more support than opposition. When I looked into this, I found it came from a Breitbart article that used a Rasmussen Reports poll from September 2023. Rasmussen isn’t the most reliable source, as FiveThirtyEight gives them a C+ rating and says their polls tend to lean Republican. The way the question was asked in the poll also seems biased since it said “shut down the government if they don’t get their way,” which makes Democrats sound unreasonable. Other polls from Morning Consult and Pew Research Center taken around the same time showed different results. They found that more voters would blame Republicans for a shutdown, not Democrats. None of them had numbers close to “27% vs 65%. Because this claim only uses one biased poll and leaves out other data, it gives a misleading picture of what people actually think, making my verdict that this claim is mostly fake. 

Sources:
Rasmussen Reports (Sept. 2023)
Morning Consult, “Government Funding Poll” (Sept. 2023)
Pew Research Center
FiveThirtyEight Pollster Ratings

Comments

I've never heard of FiveThirtyEight Pollster Ratings, that's a really helpful and interesting site to take note of in the future. I'm curious, though, what they say about the polls from Morning Consult and Pew Research Center that you referenced to back your answer? It might be helpful to note that they receive a better rating compared to Rasmussen's C+, with a lean towards Republican.

---

Thank you for acknowledging the flaws with citing a Rasmussen poll. Current Rasmussen polls related to Trump's approval rating show a wildly disproportionate response compared to more reputable pollsters, which can be seen on the New York Times Trump approval rating page: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/donald-trump-approval-rating-polls.html

Answer 2

This claim seems a little bit misleading when looked at more closely and when these numbers are better contextualized. The numbers and percentages reportedly come from a Rasmussen Reports poll in September 2023, which was later cited by Breitbart News. Upon researching Rasmussen further, I found that despite the fact that it is a polling organization, it’s often criticized for having conservative or Republican-leaning bias and swaying the participants with biased language. In this case, the wording of the poll — describing Democrats “shutting down the government if they don’t get their way” — already frames the question negatively and could skew results.

When cross-checking with other national polls (Morning Consult, Pew Research Center, and Gallup) from the same time period, no other results garnered information that was nearly as low as 27 percent. In fact, most sources I looked into actually found that voters were more likely to blame Republicans for any potential shutdown, not Democrats. This shows that the Rasmussen data may not accurately reflect the broader public opinion nor show the data coming from uninfluenced standpoints.

I also noticed the headline and framing of the claim here are somewhat sensationalized — it treats one poll’s results as fact while ignoring research and statistics from others. Most of all, this claim removes the reader from a broader political context. So while the Rasmussen poll itself is technically real, the way this claim is presented overstates its credibility and general significance.

Sources: Rasmussen Reports, Pew Research Center, Morning Consult, “Government Funding Poll,” PBS News, Newsweek