The government shutdown isn’t playing the way the left would like — and even CNN can’t hide it.
The lefty network’s polling guru on Tuesday broke the news to its ever-decreasing viewer base that Republicans haven’t lost ground in polling from when the shutdown began.
If anything, the party’s gotten stronger, including among voters in the most contested sector of American politics.
Harry Enten, one of the few reliable figures on CNN, took to the set of “News Central” to burst Democratic bubbles about the shutdown’s impact on voters.
And it wasn’t even close.
WATCH: The Schumer Shutdown has backfired so badly that it has CNN freaking out over recent poll numbers. pic.twitter.com/QBY5xysPLn
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Since the shutdown engineered by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer went into effect, Republicans have actually gained in polling support, Enten reported.
In net popularity — approval versus disapproval — the GOP as a whole has actually gained 2 percentage points, Enten reported.
“That’s within the margin of error, but clearly it hasn’t dropped,” he said.
Among Republicans actually in Congress, that gain rises to 5 percentage points, Enten said.
Even more importantly, that improved approval rating isn’t just coming from committed Republicans glad to see their party holding the line.
Republican approval among independent voters has gone up, too. And in a hot-button political fight, the party’s tactics run the risk of being either too weak for the truly committed, or too hard-line to attract independents.
“Something could rally the base but alienate those in the middle, or something could rally those in the middle but alienate the base, but the truth is, we’re not seeing that,” Enten said.
The GOP, under the leadership of President Donald Trump, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, appears to be avoiding that Scylla-and-Charybdis danger.
“What we’re seeing is the Republican brand has actually gotten better among independents, and it’s also gotten better among Republicans as well.”
That’s not likely a recipe Democrats can repeat.
Their party is locked in a civil war between an establishment, represented by Schumer and his ilk, and a surging left-wing base personified by the likes of New York City mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Vermont Sen. (and open socialist) Bernie Sanders.
In fact, it was Schumer’s fear of a primary challenge from the left — mainly in the form of Ocasio-Cortez — that spurred him to engage in this loser of a shutdown in the first place.
In short, Democrats can’t rally their base of increasingly leftist voters while attracting support from independents.
They can’t try to attract support from independents without infuriating their base. (That’s the lesson Schumer has learned.)
All of this is going to figure in next year’s midterm elections, of course. It could also play a major role in next week’s gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia. If the progressive left is truly sinking the party, the first signs could show up in the Garden State and the Old Dominion.
Will Republicans win both gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey next month?
CNN has spent virtually the entire decade of Donald Trump’s time as a national political figure distorting the truth and magnifying anti-Trump messaging — whether it was the ludicrous Jim Acosta showboating at the White House during Trump’s first term, the “Russia collusion” hoax, the network’s deliberately dishonest coverage of the “mostly peaceful” riots that raged across the United States in 2020, or the sundry fronts in lawfare against him while he was out of office.
There’s nothing the network would love more than to run a story about how the Schumer shutdown is damaging Trump’s party and helping his opponents.
But the opposite is the truth.
And even CNN is being forced to report it.
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