‘Everybody’s fault’: In Ohio, both parties are to blame for government shutdown

By Eric Bradner, CNN

Dayton, Ohio (CNN) — Howard Patterson stood outside the Wright Cycle Company — part of the national park complex dedicated to the aviation pioneers who honed their mechanical skills repairing bicycles in Dayton — on Friday, and found locked doors with a sign taped to the window.

“Due to the current lapse in federal government appropriations this site is closed to the public,” the sign said.

The 44-year-old DHL worker said he’d hoped to use a day off to visit a site he’d often taken his family to see. He also wanted to visit the National Museum of the US Air Force, but it was closed, too — the result of a federal government shutdown that started October 1, with no end in sight.

“I’m not political, and it’s affecting what we do,” he said. “My family is more Democratic, but right now I kind of blame Democrats, because that’s who we’re waiting on.”

Toyoua Jackson, a 39-year-old factory worker in Dayton, blamed President Donald Trump for the shutdown. She pointed to GOP cuts to health care spending.

“He needs to do things different,” she said. “He’s taking from the people that don’t have.”

In Washington, where the shutdown is expected to drag at least into next week, Trump and congressional leaders in both parties are playing the blame game — assigning fault to the other side for a lapse in appropriations that could leave active-duty military service members without paychecks, hundreds of thousands of government workers furloughed, national parks closed and many other services limited or delayed.

Republicans fully control the federal government, but they don’t have the 60 votes necessary to advance a funding measure in the Senate without Democratic support.

Democrats are demanding an extension of tax credits to make plans on Obamacare’s health insurance market more affordable and a reversal of Medicaid cuts that Trump signed into law earlier this year. But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Friday said the GOP has refused to negotiate “and barreled us into a shutdown.”

Republicans are seeking to shift the focus from health care to immigration, with Trump, Vice President JD Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson and others claiming that Democrats want to give free health care to undocumented immigrants. The Democratic proposal would repeal the health provisions in a section of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which limits access to Affordable Care Act subsidies, Medicaid and Medicare for certain immigrants who have been approved for some form of lawful status in the country, though Republicans argue some of these immigrants were improperly given this status by the Biden administration.

Instead, Republican leaders insist they want a vote on a “clean” government funding extension into November — with no policy negotiations before that measure is approved.

“I don’t think there’s at this point a lot to negotiate and honestly, I think that the more productive conversations are happening outside of the leader office at the moment,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Friday.

Finger-pointing in Washington

As the blame game unfolds in Washington, Americans’ views of what’s happening — and who is at fault — are still evolving.

The Washington Post’s one-day survey of 1,010 Americans on the shutdown’s first day found that 47% blamed Trump and majority Republicans in Congress, 30% blamed Democrats in Congress and 23% weren’t sure.

That poll largely echoed others conducted before the shutdown that found the public was generally more likely to fault Republicans than Democrats.

It’s a repeat of a pattern that has played out several times in recent years: Voters tend to blame the GOP for shutdowns. That’s what polls found in 2013, when the Republican-led House sought to gut funding for then-President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and then twice in Trump’s first term, when standoffs over immigration and funding for his border wall led to standoffs.

About one-quarter of those surveyed by The Washington Post said they were “very concerned” about the shutdown. Another 41% were “somewhat concerned.” However, that concern came largely from Democrats and independents; less than half of Republicans said they were concerned.

The Trump administration is using many of the tools at its disposal to try to pin blame on the Democrats.

The White House said thousands of federal workers could be permanently laid off soon, and had compiled a list of agencies to target. Meanwhile, messages on government websites — including that of the White House, Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Small Business Administration — blame the left for the shutdown.

Multiple furloughed workers from the Department of Education had out-of-office messages blaming Democrats for the government shutdown automatically sent from their email accounts without their consent or knowledge, according to four sources familiar with the situation.

Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Democrat, said on CNN the Trump administration was violating the Hatch Act, which is intended to stop the government from conducting its business in a partisan manner aimed at affecting elections.

“Instead of just saying, ‘We’re currently in a shutdown,’ you decided to play partisan politics on an official website,” Crockett said.

The White House dismissed the notion that it was unusual for an administration to publicly assign blame to the other party. “It’s an objective fact that Democrats are responsible for the government shutdown,” said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson.

Democrats, meanwhile, are responding with a social media blitz that included New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders walking together in a video lambasting Republicans’ health care spending cuts.

The House is not scheduled to be in session next week — as Johnson argues that the GOP has already done its job by approving a government funding extension there.

In the hours following a private call with GOP lawmakers that Johnson held Monday in which he said Schumer would be to blame if government funding lapsed, accounts from various House Republicans flooded social media with variations of “we did our job.”

Thune held up the 24-page bill to keep the government open in front of the White House on Monday, arguing that there is nothing partisan or controversial in a clean extension of government funding.

As the shutdown stretches on, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries claimed Trump is “missing in action” and House Republicans are “on vacation.” Meantime, he said Democrats wouldn’t back the bill Senate Republicans keep bringing up for a vote “because it guts the health care of the American people.”

‘Dumb politicians’ at fault

In Dayton, though, the details of the government shutdown and the partisan finger-pointing were largely being ignored, as people blamed both parties and politics generally.

Residents were also more worried about what the shutdown would mean for them.

The Miami Valley is home to the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, with about 38,000 military members, civilian workers and contractors — by far the region’s largest employer. It’s also home to federal museums and parks honoring the Air Force and the Wright brothers. That means federal employees make up a huge share of Dayton’s residents and its businesses’ customers.

It’s also a battleground: Montgomery County, the home of Dayton, split nearly evenly between Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. The region could prove critical again in 2026, with Democratic former Sen. Sherrod Brown challenging Republican Sen. Jon Husted in what’s expected to be one of the nation’s most closely watched Senate contests.

Memories of the shutdown could have faded by then. But in a region where the federal government’s role is so visible, many people did say they were anxious.

Tierra Freeman, the 23-year-old manager of the Fashion Remedy Boutique, said with military members not receiving paychecks and other federal workers furloughed, she worried about the customers of the business that opened just a month ago.

“You can tell when people get their checks, because that’s when they’re in the shop,” she said.

She said she isn’t sure which party is to blame for the shutdown, and had largely brushed it off because of the increasing regularity of government spending battles in Washington.

But, she said, she now believes that “this one does seem to be impacting people a lot differently. That part is a little nerve-wracking. It seems to be a bit bigger than what’s happened in the past.”

Daniella Martinez, a 35-year-old Dayton resident, is set to start a new job Monday after being laid off when her previous employer, a company that handled moves for military members, lost its government contract.

She said she wasn’t surprised by the shutdown.

“I think with an incompetent president and the rest of his lackeys running Congress and the other branches, that it was an inevitable possibility,” Martinez said.

However, she was also frustrated with Democrats, and said the shutdown is “everybody’s fault.”

“The Democrats haven’t done anything to help anybody either for years, which has forced people to think that Republicans can do better, which has only helped prove that nobody can get anything done,” Martinez said. “The government stops when the Democrats are in charge of it too. It’s an all-the-time thing.”

Addy Turner, a 20-year-old mechanical engineering major at the University of Dayton, said she thinks both parties are to blame for the impasse in Washington.

“I just think people can’t get along, and nobody wants to compromise, and that goes for both sides,” she said.

The shutdown, Turner said, is the fault of “dumb politicians and a dumb president.”

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CNN’s Annie Grayer contributed to this report.