Nancy Pelosi’s House Democrats thought impeaching Trump would help them politically, but a new Emerson College poll shows that independents have dramatically swung against impeachment.
Following the Adam Schiff-led show trial’s public hearings, President Donald Trump has surged ahead of all four top Democratic rivals in potential head-to-head matchups for the first time.
The Hill notes:
The latest national poll from Emerson College finds 45 percent [of independents] oppose impeaching President Trump, against 43 percent who support it. That’s a 6-point swing in support from October, when 48 percent of voters supported impeachment and only 44 percent opposed.
More importantly, the poll shows more independents now oppose impeachment than support it, a significant change from Emerson’s polling in October. The new poll found 49 percent oppose impeachment compared to 34 percent who support it. In October, 48 percent of independents polled supported impeachment, against 39 percent who opposed.
Since October, Emerson has found Trump’s job approval rating jump by 5 points, from 43 percent to 48 percent.
Vanity Fair writes:
n the latest Politico/Morning Consult poll, released on November 19, Independents opposed impeachment and removal from office 46% to 39%, a number close to the rolling averages of the last few weeks. It is notable that the poll was fielded after the first public impeachment hearings.
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To understand the relative lack of enthusiasm among Independents for impeachment, I took a close look at data from the most recent Politico/Morning Consult tracking poll, a poll in which the Hive had the opportunity to propose questions focused on Independents and their views. The data, along with supplementary interviews, illustrates an electorate that believes the impeachment inquiry is connected to the priorities of politicians and the media—not of ordinary voters—and an electorate confused and dispirited by the nonstop parade of Washington scandals.
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Most Independents believe, by 39% to 31%, that the president did what the whistle-blower and subsequent witnesses have said he did: withheld military aid to Ukraine until the Ukrainians agreed to announce investigations into his political rivals. And by similar margins, 40% to 35%, Independents believe Trump “abused his power” to affect the 2020 elections.
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For many, [Ambassador Sondland’s testimony yesterday] will confirm what they already believe, but for more, it will continue to be an irrelevancy disconnected from the issues that matter to them. The risk for Democrats is that impeachment will overshadow any positive messaging, and that risk is not small. On Wednesday, Sondland’s testimony effectively eclipsed the Democratic debate in Atlanta, rendering it a secondary news event at best. As the calendar turns into 2020 and voters pay more attention to the candidates, the cost of obscuring any positive messages will rise dramatically for the Democrats. As Fiorina said to me, the voting public is full of “lots of people who don’t like Trump who are still prepared to vote for him if [the Democrats] don’t nominate anyone reasonable.”
Indeed, a poll from Marquette University Law School finds:
For the first time, President Donald Trump has surged ahead of all four top Democratic rivals in potential head-to-head matchups.
And in a separate article, the Hill reports:
A plurality of voters say that the media’s coverage of the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry into President Trump is biased, according to a Hill-HarrisX poll released on Thursday.
Forty-six percent of Americans said the media’s coverage of the ongoing probe was biased against Trump, compared to 12 percent who thought coverage was actually biased in favor of the president.
D’oh!