Bad news indeed, although you may not glean that from the spin coming from the New York Times. It's not all great news for Republicans either, which one would expect from Siena, and which the NYT has no trouble covering.
However, the NYT lead uses a weird spin to suggest the GOP and Donald Trump are getting less popular while admitting the data doesn't actually support that conclusion:
President Trump’s efforts to send National Guard troops to big cities, punish media organizations and pressure universities and private businesses are all unpopular with voters.
But the continued torrent of policies and tactics has not further weakened Mr. Trump’s overall standing, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Siena University. Instead, Mr. Trump continues to retain the support of roughly nine out of 10 Republican voters.
The net result: an unpopular president with an unchanged approval rating of 43 percent. At the start of his term, Mr. Trump’s approval rating fell from its post-election highs, and it remains weak compared with his predecessors at this point in their presidencies. But over the last several months, his rating has been resilient and stable, reflecting that most voters’ opinions on him have hardened.
So ... nothing has changed, not even with a government shutdown approaching. The NYT then insinuates that Trump is at risk for taking the blame for the shutdown, while the data shows something else entirely:
Voters said they would be likeliest to blame both sides if the government shut down. But independent voters said they were twice as likely to assign blame to Mr. Trump and Republicans than to Democrats. At the same time, two-thirds of voters warned that Democrats should not shut down the government if their demands were not met.
Alex Thompson looked past the spin and pegged the story from the numbers:
Tough poll for Democrats on a shutdown.https://t.co/R6HpXz6oXl pic.twitter.com/3Hz1Muxlad
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) September 30, 2025
The most telling number here is the independents. The NYT leans on them to claim Trump will take the blame for a shutdown among them, but the results of this question more than suggest that independents will spread the blame around liberally if this lasts. And for that matter, it looks as though Democrats aren't actually enthusiasatic about a shutdown either; they're almost evenly split on the question. In this poll, they can't even get a majority of Democrats to approve of a shutdown as a bargaining tactic.
In a way, the topline on this question mirrors the denial in which both Democrats and the Protection Racket Media have lived ever since Trump won the election in November. They have consistently chosen the wrong side of every issue where broad consensus exists. We refer to these as 80/20 issues, and some of them actually are literally 80/20 or more with voters -- crime, immigration, and so forth. Now, even the NYT/Siena poll showes 65% of the electorate opposes the use of a shutdown by Democrats as a bargaining maneuver, and even 43% of Democrats oppose it, especially given the existence of a continuing resolution.
So why did Schumer (and Jeffries, to a lesser extent) choose to reject the clean CR and avoid the shutdown? Their radical-activist base demanded it. Trump practically dared them to block the shutdown with his AI-driven sombrero video of Jeffries and Schumer, yet another instance of what I've called his cornering strategy in leveraging their blinding hate of Trump to push them into the 20% positions across the board. Trump keeps leading Schumer and other Democrat leaders by the nose into positions that are more and more absurd, and more and more detached from the electorate. Trump already has Gavin Newsom doing a Temu Trump impression that is so fake that even Greasy Gavin should be embarrassed.
Anyway, these are early hours, and we'll see how this plays out. The history of shutdowns strongly indicates that Democrats will live to regret this, especially now that they have conceded that shutdowns are not budgetary insurrections, as they have claimed in the past. When Democrats in blue states start feeling the impact of letting Trump run this shutdown -- as New Yorkers just found out this morning in the cancellation of a massive public-works project -- the Schumer Shutdown will likely collapse. Even the Protection Racket Media won't help much, thanks to decades of pissing away their credibility, and its consumers realizing it exists only as a propaganda amplification industry for the progressive elite. Schumer's only hope is that Trump will overplay his hand, and while that's a real risk, right now it's Democrats melting down into tantrums rather than doing their jobs.
Addendum: It's not just Siena, either. Echelon polled on this question in the same time period, and the results are even more stark:
After being given additional context, voters overwhelmingly said Democrats should not withhold votes to fund the government.
— Echelon Insights (@EchelonInsights) September 30, 2025
The one group that disagreed with this is Democrats, who narrowly supported withholding votes and shutting down the government by a two-point margin. pic.twitter.com/FmceVUERzi
I'm curious as to the motives of the 10% of Republicans who want the Schumer Shutdown. Do they want Trump unleashed on the Swamp? Or are they just crypto-Dems?
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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