Poll: Deal that avoided a shutdown is more popular with Dems

The spending agreement reached late Friday that staved off a government shutdown is considerably more popular with Democrats than with Republicans, according to a new poll. 

Fifty-eight percent of U.S. adults polled said they approved of the agreement reached by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) late Friday night that cuts $38 billion from federal spending between now and the end of September.

Thirty-eight percent disapproved of the deal, while 5 percent had no opinion, according to a CNN/Opinion Research poll released Monday.

The poll's internal numbers found that Democrats and independents were most likely to favor the deal. Democrats backed it 66-28 percent (with a 6 percent margin of error), while independents supported it 56-39 percent (with a 5 percent margin of error).

Republicans, by contrast, expressed slight opposition to the deal. Forty-seven percent of Republicans said they supported the deal, negotiated chiefly by the GOP Speaker of the House, while 49 percent disapproved of the agreement.

Obama and Democrats in Congress have said they don't enjoy making the kinds of cuts contained in the deal, but they might enjoy political credit for it anyway.

Forty-eight percent of Americans said that the president and congressional Democrats deserved the most credit for reaching the agreement. Thirty-five percent credited the agreement to Republicans in Congress; 11 percent said both parties were equally responsible for the agreement.

The agreement was reached shortly before a deadline at midnight on Friday, after which the government would have run out of money and shut down. Democrats moved to allow more cuts than they had initially proposed, and Republicans agreed to drop "riders" from the bill, which would have cut federal support to Planned Parenthood and reined in the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) regulatory powers.

The CNN poll indicated that Americans thought neither side gave up too much in the agreement, and suggested opposition to the riders that almost scuttled a deal. Sixty-five percent of respondents said funding to Planned Parenthood should continue, while 71 percent favor continued funding to the EPA to enforce its greenhouse gas regulations.

The poll, conducted April 9-10 (i.e., after the agreement was reached), has a 3.5 percent margin of error for the overall sample.