The strategy is not without its critics. Liberal commentator Jonathan Chait blasted the Democratic effort as “delusional” on the day that it was announced. According to Chait, the proposal is naive in assuming that Trump would not be willing to spend the money and that it ignores how past Republican presidents have had no problem with deficit and stimulus spending.

Chait also warned Democrats that helping Trump achieve a bipartisan victory with an infrastructure bill would also confer legitimacy on him which would only benefit Republicans:

In theory, it might make sense for the public to conclude that Democrats are doing a better job than Republicans of helping Trump govern. In reality, that is not how they think at all. If Trump passes a bipartisan bill, it will make Trump more popular, and thus Trump’s party more popular. Democrats’ success in the next two elections will be determined by Trump’s approval ratings. The lower his ratings, the better Democrats will do. Voters are not going to reward Democrats for proving they can get stuff done with Trump.

That’s certainly one possible outcome. But there’s some evidence to suggest that Democratic voters have dramatically different attitudes toward political compromise than the GOP base does.

Put simply, Democratic voters want their politicians to compromise and get things done. Republican voters are much less inclined toward working together. Thus, Democrats are not likely to benefit from frequent threats of government shutdowns the way that Republicans did during the Obama years.

This disparity has existed for some time. Following the 2000 recount controversy, 64 percent of Democrats told the Los Angeles Times that they supported George W. Bush as the president. In a June 2001 CBS/New York Times survey, Democrats were 10 points more likely than Republicans to favor cooperation between Bush and congressional Democrats.

In 1998, a Gallup survey found that just 49 percent of self-identified Republican participants wanted their party to elect leaders who would be more willing to compromise with then-president Bill Clinton. At the same time, 50 percent of GOP respondents said they wanted their party to pursue “more conservative” policies.

The partisan split over compromise only widened during the Obama era. Seven years after Republicans made obstruction their primary governing strategy, Democratic voters were still seeking to work together. A 2015 NBC/Wall Street Journal survey found that self-identified Democrats favored presidential candidates who wanted to “gain consensus” instead of “stick to their positions” by a margin of 60 percent to 35 percent. In contrast, Republican respondents slightly preferred an uncompromising candidate, 49 percent to 48 percent.

A 2014 Pew Research poll found similar results. Roughly two-thirds of Republicans, 66 percent, wanted their congressional leaders to “stand up” to then-president Obama. Just 43 percent of Democrats said they wanted Obama to “stand up” to Republicans. In 2015, an AP poll found that 62 percent of GOP respondents said they were even willing to support a government shutdown in the service of conservative principles.

The greater Democratic willingness to compromise is mostly the result of the successful efforts of conservatives to drive moderates out of the Republican party and the post-Clinton efforts of Democrats to take them in. There likely is some sort of psycho-ideological impulse behind conservative and liberal attitudes as well. In fact, it’s something that Chait has written about himself in a 2011 article for the New Republic:

Republican voters, much more than Democrats, want their leaders to stick to principles and avoid compromise. . . . I suspect it reflects the underlying differences between conservatism and liberalism. Liberalism is an ideology that values considering every question through the side of the other fellow and not just through your own perspective.

Chait may not like it, but polling and psychology suggest that Democratic voters expect their political leaders to try and find some common ground. We’re also still so far away from the 2018 midterm elections that any credibility Trump might gain from being able to claim victory on an infrastructure package isn’t likely to have any staying power given how fast the news cycle moves in the age of Twitter.

Using compromise as a weapon is something that has already worked in the past for Democrats.

During the George W. Bush presidency, Democrats, led by Sen. Tom Daschle, didn’t set brushfires in Capitol rotunda the way that Ted Cruz did during the Obama years. But they achieved great results for themselves nonetheless, winning a majority of state governorships and majorities in both the House and the Senate. Much of that had to do with the fact that Daschle and his colleagues persuaded left-leaning voters that they had tried to compromise but had been rejected by extremist Republicans.

Past is not predicate, of course, but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that if Democrats allow Trump to take sole ownership of an infrastructure spending bill that ends up creating even a few hundred thousand new jobs, the president’s efforts to retain and expand his share of the blue-collar vote will pay off big time. Attempting to pry Trump away from Republican orthodoxy, on the other hand, may alienate some on the Democratic left, but it makes political sense.