The government shutdown is finally over, but not before inflicting pain on millions of Americans, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll.
Forty-four percent of Americans in the survey said the shutdown had hurt their families, including 19 percent who said it hurt a lot. Forty-six percent said it made no difference, and 5 percent said it helped. The poll was conducted Oct. 15 and Oct. 16, before Congress reached an agreement that ended the shutdown.
The poll found more Americans feeling pain in the shutdown’s third week than in the first week, when a HuffPost/YouGov poll conducted Oct. 4 and Oct. 5 found that 38 percent of Americans said the shutdown was hurting them or their families.
Even those who said their families had not been harmed worried about the shutdown’s impact on the country. Seventy-one percent of respondents said the shutdown had hurt the economy, and 73 percent said it had hurt the country as a whole.
The financial ratings agency Standard & Poor’s said that the shutdown took at least $24 billion out of the US economy. The firm lowered its estimate of fourth quarter gross domestic product growth from 3 percent to 2 percent.
Majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents in the poll said the shutdown was hurting the country as a whole. Republicans, however, were less likely than other groups to say the shutdown had affected them personally — 58 percent of Democrats, 41 percent of independents and 26 percent of Republicans said that the shutdown had hurt their families.
The poll also found Americans worried what would happen if Congress had failed to raise the debt ceiling Wednesday night. Sixty-seven percent of respondents said it would hurt the economy, 64 percent said it would hurt the country as a whole and 52 percent said it would hurt their own families. Huffington Post
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