Polling from this past week consistently shows that more Americans blame President Trump and the Republicans than congressional Democrats for the ongoing government shutdown.
While that could certainly change as the impasse drags on, Democratic leaders’ position should at the very least be bolstered by Americans’ historically strong support for liberal fiscal policies. After all, the public is particularly supportive of the progressive health care policies that Democrats are fighting to maintain in their negotiations to reopen the U.S. government.
An unusually liberal fiscal policy mood
Americans are typically in a conservative fiscal policy mood when Republican presidents take office following Democratic administrations. James Stimson’s data from 1952 to 2024, for example, shows that “policy mood liberalism” reached its two lowest points over the past 72 years in 1952 and 1980 – election years where the Republican presidential candidates, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, respectively won landslide victories to oust Democrats from the White House.
This longstanding pattern in which Americans generally become more conservative during Democratic administrations and more liberal under Republican presidents undergirds one of the most influential accounts of public opinion: the thermostatic model of policy attitudes. In the thermostatic model, the public’s policy attitudes shift against the current president’s policies in response to real or perceived changes in the status quo – just like a thermostat will cool down a house when it gets too hot, or heat it up when it gets too cold.
It’s no surprise, then, that Stimson’s policy mood index sparked headlines such as “Americans are more conservative than they’ve been in decades” during Barack Obama’s second term in the White House. Nor is it surprising that his data subsequently fueled stories on the 60-year high in “support for left-wing policymaking” during Donald Trump’s first presidential administration.
It is more puzzling, however, that policy mood liberalism remained historically high throughout Joe Biden’s presidency. Americans’ support for governmental services, if anything, slightly increased from 2020 through 2024, even though the sharp rise in federal spending during the pandemic era was one cause of the surging inflation. In fact, there was stronger support for expanding government services in the 2024 American National Election Study than at any time since the ANES began asking this question in 1982.
Growing support for governmental health care programs
Americans’ liberal fiscal policy mood extends into increasing public support for governmental health care programs. Take this chart, for example.
The graph shows Americans’ net support for various governmental health care policies from 2000 to 2024 in surveys conducted by the ANES, Gallup, and the General Social Survey (GSS). Net approval varies considerably by pollster, with stronger support for the GSS question about government helping to pay for medical care than the ANES question about the federal government providing single-payer health insurance plans. But the trends are similar across all three surveys.
Indeed, support for the government’s role in health care noticeably declined during the heated debate over the Affordable Care Act (ACA) throughout Barack Obama’s presidency. It then increased amidst the first Trump administration’s efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare, and support for the policies continued to grow over the course of Biden’s presidency. Tracking data from Gallup, KFF, and Civiqs also show that net support for the ACA reached then-record highs by the end of 2024.
Americans are even more supportive of the two specific health care policies that Democrats are fighting to maintain in their shutdown negotiations. A new KFF Health Tracking poll found that 78% of adults support Congress extending the Obamacare subsidies that are set to expire at the end of this year for people who buy their own insurance through the ACA’s Marketplace. Three-quarters of adults in a July 2025 YouGov/Economist survey were similarly opposed to Medicaid cuts, which will take effect over the next three years without congressional action.
So why is the public in such a liberal fiscal policy mood?
Several factors have likely contributed to the public’s historically liberal fiscal policy mood. One is the growing influence of populist rhetoric in GOP politics. Republicans primarily attacked Biden over cultural issues (e.g., immigration) – not the administration’s relatively popular fiscal policies, such as the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
The upshot is that immigration attitudes shifted thermostatically to the right from 2020 through 2024 while support for progressive fiscal policies remained at near-record high levels. These thermostatic shifts are a big reason why immigration was such a stronger issue for Trump in the 2024 presidential campaign than it was in 2020. They also help explain why the president has consistently received higher marks on immigration in general and border security in particular than on any other issue during his second term in the White House.
Yet, Republicans’ rising populist rhetoric also exposes an inherent contradiction for a party whose legislative agenda continues to push for fiscally conservative policies that cut governmental programs to help offset tax cuts for corporations and wealthy Americans. Those policies are increasingly at odds with public opinion. They could, therefore, put the GOP at a disadvantage in negotiations with Democrats who are refusing to reopen the government without restoring funding for Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies.
