Dan Pfeiffer thinks the Democrats have the upper hand on the TSA situation:
1. Voters Are Likely to Blame Republicans, Not Democrats
Most shutdowns are high-profile affairs that dominate political coverage, with intense focus on the stakes and the human cost.
Not this one.
It’s one department, much of which is already funded, and it’s unfolding in the middle of a war. Most Americans have been going about their daily lives largely unaware of the shutdown — until they get to the airport.
And even then, it’s not obvious to travelers that the lines are the result of a government shutdown.
And even if people in line figure out that a shutdown is the cause, I don’t think they’ll automatically blame Democrats. They’re much more likely to blame Republicans.
We saw this pattern in the last shutdown: all of the polling showed that a plurality of voters blamed Republicans, not Democrats, even though Democrats had initiated the shutdown and were very public about their reasons for doing so.
This reflexive tendency to blame Trump and Republicans stems from two things. First, Republicans control everything. When something isn’t working, voters hold the party in power responsible for fixing it. Second, Trump’s personal brand is such that whenever there’s a dispute or a crisis, most people’s default assumption is that he’s the one being unreasonable. The majority of voters presume he is at fault.
The key point for Democrats: as more people pay attention to the shutdown, the political pressure should fall on Republicans, not Democrats.
2. Democrats Have the Better Argument
The Democratic case is two-fold. First, they are demanding commonsense reforms to ICE following the killing of two American citizens and countless other examples of dangerous and illegal behavior by the agency.
That argument has real purchase. Americans are deeply unhappy with ICE and Trump’s broader approach to immigration enforcement. A Marist/NPR poll from February found that 60% of Americans disapprove of ICE, 65% believe ICE has gone too far, and 62% think ICE is making Americans less safe.
And immigration is no longer a political asset for Trump. According to Nate Silver’s model, Trump is nearly ten points underwater on the issue.
This is why Trump’s idea to send ICE agents to help TSA is a potential political disaster for Republicans.
The second part of the Democratic argument may be even stronger. Republicans are the ones blocking TSA funding. Democrats want to fund TSA and the rest of DHS now, while negotiations on ICE reform continue. Republicans have voted down bills to fund TSA alone at least half a dozen times.
Last night, Trump made the Republicans’ position even weaker by saying that he wouldn’t sign a bill funding DHS unless Congress passed the politically toxic SAVE Act.
That’s a powerful political and rhetorical position: Democrats want to pay TSA workers and fix a broken agency. Republicans are saying no.
They need to make sure that the public understands that and it won’t be easy. The right wing noise machine is shouting to the rooftops that the Democrats are at fault. Some are even saying that this show ICE are really the good guys just helping out in a crisis. (See? They aren’t even wearing masks now that Trump asked them not to!)
I don’t think most people will buy it but you can’t take anything for granted. The Democrats have to find a way to penetrate the cacophony. I’m not sure what it takes but I would guess that as the lines get longer and people get more and more impatient they are going to be looking for the explanation and the Democrats have to be everywhere, in national and local media, social media, mailings, outreach of every kind. They need to own that narrative. I don’t know if they can do it.