Impeachment Implosion: Wave Of Polls Show Swing Toward Trump

It appears that Nancy Pelosi’s initial political instincts were right: Impeaching President Trump over a phone call would be bad politics. And now with the hearings held and the two milquetoast articles of impeachment on the table, which do not even mention a Constitutionally requisite crime, it may be worse than she thought.

It’s so sudden that we are seeing about a dozen House Democrats in Trump-won districts publicly stating they would prefer censure over impeachment. They will likely be strong-armed into voting for impeachment, but we can only imagine what their internal district polling must look like.

FiveThirtyEight has created a running poll aggregator that pulls in every poll that asks some version of a yes/no question on the Trump impeachment. It’s like the RealClear Politics list of polls, but it uses a lot more polls and created a formula for aggregating them them all together. In this respect, it gives the broadest view and maybe most importantly, the trendline.

And that trendline ain’t good for Democrats.

At the beginning of the hearings last week, the FiveThirtyEight poll aggregator had Americans favoring the impeachment of Trump by 5.3 percent support. (That included polls both in impeaching and impeaching and removing.) But as of today, that gap has shrunk to 1.7 percent supporting impeachment.

The RCP composite poll on impeachment shows the same shift. It went from Americans favoring it by a 3.2 percent margin at the beginning of the hearings all the way down to Americans being dead even right now.

That’s a huge move considering both FiveThirtyEight and RCP are still pulling in those polls that were higher earlier. This aggregator is showing what the Quinnipiac and Monmouth polls showed this week — that the impeachment hearings are doing the opposite of making the case for Democrats’ impeachment claims.

Both Quinnipiac and Monmouth showed moves of up to seven points against impeachment, and gigantic swings among independent voters.

And on the bottom line — because this is all political — Firehouse Strategies released their new quarterly battleground polling results this week and found Trump surging in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — which likely mirror what Democrats are seeing in districts won by Trump.

The shift is interesting in its timing. One would suppose that once the Democrats got to make their case, with just their witnesses, in the chamber where they have a majority, that the polls would swing toward impeachment — at least until the Senate held the “trial” phase and many different witnesses were brought in.

But it was actually during this time that the polls shifted against impeachment. One possible explanation is that when Americans were only getting information filtered and fitted by the Democrat Media Establishment, they were more in favor of impeachment. When the media could not spin it for those Americans watching, the polls shifted.

Whatever the reason, impeachment was a gigantic miscalculation by Democrats, one they may pay for in November.

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