Impeach in haste, repent at leisure. If Democrats don’t want to listen to advice from their own strategists, perhaps they might pay attention to a little from a friendly media outlet. The polling around impeachment can no longer be ignored, CNN’s Chris Cillizza concludes, and it’s not running in the Democrats’ direction. “[T]here’s growing evidence,” Cillizza writes, “that the public impeachment proceedings may actually be helping Trump politically”:
Take a new Gallup poll released Wednesday morning, before the House vote, which shows two things happening since House Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, opened up a formal impeachment inquiry in October regarding Trump’s conduct with Zelensky:
1) Trump’s job approval rating has gone from 39% to 45%
2) Support for Trump’s impeachment and removal has dipped from 52% to 46%.Those results largely affirm other data out over the past week or so that suggest support for impeachment has dipped. In a CNN national poll released earlier this week, 45% said they supported the impeachment and removal of the President — down from 50% who said the same in a mid-November CNN survey. That same poll showed opposition to impeachment/removal at 46%, up 4 points from mid-November. And a CNN “poll of polls” — an average of all six most recent quality/credible national polling conducted between December 4 and December 15 — showed 46% favored impeachment and removal as compared to 49% who did not.
Last night’s news from an NBC/WSJ poll didn’t do anything to suggest otherwise, either. This has been one of the more friendly polling series on impeachment thus far, and yet the only movement in the latest iteration is a slight shift to opposition:
Forty-eight percent of Americans believe that Trump should be impeached and removed from office, while an equal 48 percent say they disagree.
Those numbers are essentially unchanged from late October, when 49 percent said the president should be impeached and removed and 46 percent said they were opposed.
By party, the current poll shows 83 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of independents supporting the president’s impeachment and removal.
Today’s trackers show a slight bump in the direction of supporting impeachment, thanks to a couple of new results from Economist/YouGov (Yes+8) and Politico/Morning Consult (Yes+7). However, both of those series have run as outliers throughout the impeachment process. The RealClearPolitics tracker still shows an aggregate of No+0.8. Those two series have produced the only positive results for impeachment support in their aggregation for the past month, and except for one CNN poll in late November, the only positive results for the past two months. Thanks to the addition of those two poll results, the 538 tracker shows a slight boost today as well to Yes+1.2%.
Even this, though, is a problem for Democrats. They needed a dramatic swing in support for removing Trump, not a slight shift from the status quo of stalemate, even if it was real. Impeachment isn’t selling where Democrats need it most — the swing states — and increased support from deep-blue bases like California and New York don’t do them any good. Their case for removal has flopped everywhere except their base, and Cillizza’s correct in that the longer it goes on, the more frustrated everyone will get at their failure, including their base.
Plus, while he doesn’t specifically note this, Cillizza puts his finger on precisely why this is playing into Trump’s hands. Democrats have chosen to fight Trump on his most favored ground — chaos:
What Pelosi knew then — and knows now — is that impeachment is a chaos-creator in the American electorate. There is simply no certainty about how the voters — particularly the small number of independent and/or undecided voters — will react to all of this.
And the early returns — emphasis on the word “early” — have to make Democrats worried.
Voters elected Trump to be a chaos-creator president as part of their populist backlash against institutional indifference. Chaos only makes Trump look more successful, and the use of impeachment by Beltway elites only adds to the dissatisfaction voters have with the institutions. The potential for backfire is enormous, and grows with every attempt by Trump’s political enemies to warp the institutions to punish him.
And that prompts the question again: Having flopped with impeachment, what precisely do House Democrats think they’ll gain by warping the process to hold the Senate hostage to impose their own will on the upper chamber? How much backfire do they want in 2020?
