The most recent analysis of poll data finds that Democrats are likely to turn out as the big losers in their impeachment gamble. Even as that analysis shows the impeachment machine is losing steam, President Trump’s approval ratings are gaining. As predicted, impeachment seems to be backfiring for Democrats.
The analysis, published by Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight since October 2 and updated Sunday, is the result of taking data from other available polls and comparing it to remove duplicate or skewed information. As the site explains:
We are collecting all the polls we can find that ask respondents some version of a yes-or-no question about whether they support impeaching Trump, though some polls also give respondents a “don’t know” or “no opinion” option. If the same poll asks more than one impeachment question (using different wording), we include both questions, but the results of those questions are averaged together, then input into the model, so the poll is not double counted.
While liberal media — acting as accomplices to Democrats in their witch-hunt to impeach and remove President Trump by endless (and biased) coverage — would make it appear that “impeach and remove” is an overwhelmingly popular idea, this analysis indicates it is faltering. In fact, after enjoying a brief period of popularity at its peak in early October, the idea is steadily losing ground.
As of Sunday, only 46.5 percent of those polled with questions such as “Should President Trump be impeached and removed from office?” responded in the positive. Those numbers change only slightly when the data for all polls — including the generic “Would you like to see Congress begin the process to impeach President Donald Trump, or not?” — is taken into account.
Not only that, but opposition to impeachment is at its highest since the early October outbreak of Impeachment Fever began to subside. As of Sunday, it was at 45.6 percent when all types of impeachment questions are taken together.
FiveThirtyEight also shows President Trump’s approval rating remaining around 41-42 percent, while Real Clear Politics has it at 44.2 percent.
To put that in perspective, President Obama’s approval rating for the same week in his first term — (November 14-20, 2011 — as he was approaching his 2012 re-election race) was 43 percent, according to Gallup. That’s 1.2 percent lower than Trump’s. Yet Obama — who, had not been subject to a fake Russia collusion narrative for the first three years of his presidency and was not under an impeachment inquiry as the result of a false “whistleblower” complaint — was re-elected in 2012.
And President Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is much higher (89 percent) than President Obama’s was among Democrats (79 percent) during the weeks we are comparing.
In short, Democrats have failed to make their case against President Trump. Having been shown time and again to be building one false argument after another, they appear to have lost the ability to convince the public of outrageous claims. Since it is unlikely that Democrats have saved the most credible, damning accusations for last, it may be time to roll the closing credits on the impeachment inquiry.
President Trump has other things working in his favor, as well. With the economy doing so well under his administration, national research firm Moody Analytics released the results of a study last month describing Trump’s re-election chances with language such as “steamroll the competition” and “The 2020 election looks like Trump’s to lose.” Of course, that means all the more when one considers that Moody Analytics has been right in predicting the results of every presidential race since 1980.
It should of course be noted that polls are not always a reflection of reality. After all, the polls continued to show Hillary Clinton in the lead even as the election results were showing Trump ahead and on his way to winning.
Having said that, this is an indication of two things: First, the divide in the United States is greater than it has ever been in this writer’s 48 years on this planet. In fact, one may have to look back to the 1860s to see a more pronounced division between brothers, daughters, and neighbors.
Second, with President Trump’s extremely high approval rating among his own party and the decline in the outbreak of Impeachment Fever, Democrats would likely do well to find a way to kill the inquiry. If — and it is still an if — they manage to get the necessary votes in the House to impeach Trump, there is about a zero percent chance that they would get the needed two-thirds of the Senate to convict. After all, that would require Republican senators to vote against not only the facts, but the overwhelming majority of their base.
A much more likely scenario is that Democrats — recognizing that “the 2020 election looks like Trump’s to lose” — have gambled on impeachment as the only way to beat Trump and now they are going to pay for it. Depending on how badly this blows up in their faces, they may not only lose the presidential election in 2020, they may also lose their recent gains in the House and Senate.
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C. Mitchell Shaw is a freelance writer and public speaker who addresses a range of topics related to liberty and the U.S. Constitution. A strong privacy advocate, he was a privacy nerd before it was cool.
