Various polls on the shutdown find that American disapproval is highest for Congressional Republicans. Kilgore warns against over-interpreting these numbers:
[T]he big differentiator is that self-identified Democrats approve of Obama’s handling of the budget fight by a 77/21 margin, while self-identified GOPers approve of their congressional party’s positioning by a mere 52/45 margin. … What we know beyond the numbers is that despite John Boehner’s forced march towards Ted Cruz’s position on the government shutdown and Obamacare, quite a few conservative opinion-leaders don’t think GOPers have gone far enough. In particular, the Senate Conservative Fund and Heritage Action—along with RedState’s Erick Erickson—have been loudly unhappy with Boehner’s “watering down” of the bedrock “defund Obamacare” position on the continuing resolution.
So it’s entirely possible that a portion of the “blame gap” is represented by conservatives who wouldn’t side with Obama or congressional Democrats on the appropriations or debt limit issues if pigs learned to fly—just as a sizable portion of the people claimed by Republicans as “repeal Obamacare” fans actually favor a single payer system and wouldn’t back GOPers on health care issues if their lives depended on it.
Enten remains focused on the economy:
[T]he political arguments over the shutdown and debt ceiling fight may not matter that much at all.
As University of North Carolina political scientist Jim Stimson found (via Mark Blumenthal of the Huffington Post), it’s consumer sentiment that tends to have the greatest impact on approval ratings and hence elections.
After the last go-round on the debt ceiling, the economy had started to pick up by the end of October 2011, and Obama’s approval rating followed. But the lesson for Democrats who may be thinking smugly that the Republicans will take the biggest hit for the federal shutdown and government default angst is that if the economy goes south as a result, then it’ll likely be the Democratic president who sustains the most damage.
The Dish 