Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Chuck Schumer, and President Trump faced off in the Oval Office Monday in a meeting that suggested a shutdown fight is coming on Christmas week.
The Democratic leaders did what their base presumably wants (opposing a wall), and Trump did what his base presumably wants (fighting for a wall). Trump even said he would shut down the government to get his wall.
But when Trump talks about a “wall,” there is a difference between what his supporters and his opponents say he really means, and it is in that gap that the president may have room to maneuver and get off the road to a shutdown.
While it is true that more voters would prefer a compromise that avoids a shutdown, according to a new poll from NPR/Marist, two-thirds of Republicans want President Trump to hold firm and shut it all down if he doesn’t get the border wall he’s been asking for since before he was president.
Thinking purely of the politics, you can understand why Republicans may not fear a shutdown. In 2013, then-President Barack Obama and Speaker John Boehner failed to reach a compromise and the government was closed for over two weeks; while Democrats soared to an advantage on the generic ballot during the shutdown, their gains were wiped out a month later in the wake of the disastrous “Healthcare.gov” exchange website debacle.
But as the midterm election results made clear, simply hanging on to the Trump base isn’t enough for Republicans to succeed anymore. The question the White House should be asking, then, is this: Is there a way to satisfy Republican voters without having to shut down the government first?
To understand how this might work, it is important first to define what is being fought over and ask what a “wall” means to voters. Is there an expectation of a massive physical barrier spanning thousands of miles, or is the “wall” more or less a term interchangeable with “border security”?
Throughout the president’s first term, his allies have tried to make clear that a “wall” is more or less a catch-all for a variety of border enforcement measures. Earlier this year, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said, “I hate to use the word ‘wall,’ because that implies you might want a steel wall for 2,000 miles.” Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said “people want to paint his definition, that it’s some 2,000-mile-long, 30-foot-high wall of concrete …That’s not what he means, and that’s not what he’s trying to say.” Even White House adviser Kellyanne Conway went on record saying that a wall isn’t really an all-the-way-across-the-border-wall, noting “the president discovered that part of it will be the physical wall, part of it is better technology, part of it is also fencing.”
Here’s the interesting part — this is also how Trump supporters hear it.
In polling I conducted for advocacy group FWD.us in 2017, we asked voters: “When you hear Donald Trump talking about his desire to build a wall on the border with Mexico, do you think he intends to build a large physical wall across the entire border with Mexico, or do you think he intends to increase border security through building a partial wall on the border, along with increased fencing and improved technology?” A majority of Republicans (51 percent) said they thought it meant increased border security while only 36 percent thought it meant a physical wall all the way across. Among Democrats, the result was flipped, with a majority thinking Trump means a full-on wall when he says a wall.
The good news is that, in that same Marist poll showing a majority of voters wanting President Trump do avoid shutting down the government just to get wall funding, it is also the case that a majority (53 percent) of voters say they currently approve of the job President Trump is doing at “the protection of U.S. borders,” a figure that is significantly higher than his job approval over all. This, without a “wall” yet having been built under his administration.
And when asked what their top priority is for any immigration reform package, both Republican voters and “swing voters” say that stricter vetting and keeping out criminals is most essential. Even 41 percent of Democrats name that as one of the most important things we should do on immigration reform, placing it only behind DACA on Democrats’ priority list. Border security is, in fact, a bipartisan priority. Meanwhile, the “physical border wall” only ranks third as an immigration priority among Republicans, is toward the middle of the pack for swing voters, and is dead last for Democrats.
Voters of all partisan leanings would like Trump to do something about border security, to increase enforcement, to boost vetting. “Border security” is more of a priority and more unifying than “the Wall,” and it’s already what Trump’s supporters say “the Wall” means anyway. Democrats can feel politically comfortable opposing “the Wall,” but would be in a much tougher spot opposing additional funds for border security.
A smart negotiator-in-chief would be able to use this fact to his advantage to get the border security his supporters really expect.
