Polls say Americans blame GOP for the shutdown, but it may not matter in 2026

As the longest government shutdown in U.S. history gets closer to ending, how could it impact future elections with the 2026 midterms less than a year away? A government shutdown is nothing new, and past shutdowns have shown that their effects on Election Day are limited.

Current shutdown

This shutdown began on Oct. 1 and last week broke the record for the longest closure that had been set in 2019. Polling shows a majority of Americans blame Republicans, but opinions mostly follow party lines.

“Historically, the party that takes the blame for a shutdown is the party that asks for something in addition to clean funding of government,” Justin Buchler, an associate professor of political science at Case Western University, told Straight Arrow News.

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Buchler said this time was a bit different because, even though it was Democratic lawmakers seeking the extension of expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies, President Donald Trump did something that shifted the blame.

“You had the Democratic Party making an additional demand, which would normally mean that blame would go to them,” Buchler said. “But then the president, who’s the leader of the Republican Party, says that he’s willing to negotiate on those terms, which changes the calculus of blame allocation entirely.”

Election impact

Amidst this shutdown came off-year elections in many states, with Democrats recording major victories. Could the shutdown have played a role in that?

“I think that the general factors for the off-year elections that just happened were normal political forces, relatively unrelated to the shutdown,” Buchler said.

Buchler pointed to Trump’s low approval rating and the fact that nonpresidential elections often go against the party that controls the White House.

Since the end of World War II, the president’s party has lost, on average, 26 seats in the House during midterm elections.

During that same time frame, the president’s party has only gained seats in midterm elections twice — in 1998, when Republicans were seen as overreaching on former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and in 2002, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

So, is the shutdown likely to impact next year’s midterms?

“This particular shutdown, by happening late in 2025, is not close enough to the midterm elections for any potential impact on the president’s approval rating to really matter for the 2026 midterm,” Buchler said. “So that’s probably out. It’s also probably not a long enough shutdown for any really big impact on the state of the economy, which is the other potential avenue for an electoral effect.”

With a year still to go, plenty more could happen that could have a bigger impact on voters.

“We are too far out from an election for the events of 2025 — the day-to-day events — to matter all that much for 2026,” Buchler said. “What tends to matter for elections, for predictive models, stuff like the president’s approval rating and the state of the economy, and this is going to turn out to be noise when we wind up looking at President Trump’s approval rating by 2026.”

Previous shutdowns

While this is the longest shutdown on record, Buchler pointed to concurrent shutdowns under Clinton toward the end of 1995 into 1996 as having the biggest impact.

But even that didn’t impact Election Day.

“That was really gone by the ’96 election,” Buchler said. “So, I wouldn’t really expect much of an effect.”

This was the 22nd government shutdown since 1976. Eight of those occurred under President Ronald Reagan, one of the most popular presidents in American history.

“We’ve been through so many shutdowns over the course of the years that Americans don’t tend to react all that much anymore to a shutdown,” Buchler said. “A lot of people kind of ignored this shutdown because we’ve been through so many. So, these are just sort of blips in political history at this point.”