DEMS RETHINKING SHUTDOWN? – AT 11:45 A.M. ET:  The great political reporter, John Fund, says that some Democrats are rethinking the strategy behind shutting down the government.  Yes, there are Democrats whose minds are not completely cooked.  From NRO:

No one knows when the government shutdown will be ended, but it’s increasingly likely that Democrats will rue the day they launched it. “I’m concerned that we don’t have an exit strategy,” one Democratic aide for a liberal senator told NBC News on Sunday. He went on to say: “This is a question of who’s going to flinch first.”

One reason Democrats are nervous is that the longer the shutdown goes on, the longer voters will start to realize the Democrats are fighting not so much for the Dreamers — people brought to this country as children by adults who entered illegally — but for the concepts of “chain migration” and the “diversity lottery,” which have done so much to warp our immigration policy and make it a shambles.

Even staunch pro-immigration voices increasingly recognize that emphasizing family reunification through chain migration shouldn’t be the heart of our immigration policy. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, a prominent pro-immigrant voice for decades, and his co-author Clint Bolick wrote back in 2013:

Since the 1960s, the vast majority of legal immigrants have come pursuant to a very broad definition of “family reunification” — which includes not only spouses and minor children but parents and siblings. Family preferences account for two-thirds of all legal immigrants.

It’s because Democrats fear that bringing these facts to light in a debate over Dreamers that they are trying to run away from the term “chain migration.” Media Matters, the pro–Hillary Clinton propaganda group, derides the term as “a misleading nativist buzzword.”

COMMENT:  Add to that some new polling by CNN showing that the "generic" gap between Democrats and Republicans regarding the 2018 mid-term elections has narrowed considerably.  Only a month ago, the Dems were up by double digits.  Now they're in the mid single digits.  Some Dems are starting to realize that the 2018 races won't be the cakewalk they'd thought.

The Democrats have always underestimated Donald Trump and his ability to bring people behind him.  May they make the same mistake again.

January 22, 2018