[guest post by Dana]
While most Democrats support impeachment, Democrats in 2020 key states may take a hit as a result, which in turn could benefit Trump:
Democrats and Republicans are mirror opposites on the issue, with an average of 86 percent of Democrats supporting impeachment, compared with 9 percent of Republicans. Democrats have grown more united in their support for impeachment since before the inquiry began, when polls showed roughly two-thirds supported impeachment. Among Republicans, an average of 87 percent are opposed, while 8 percent of Democrats say the same.
[…]
Battleground state polls show a more negative reaction to the impeachment inquiry, signaling more risk to Democrats and potential benefit for Trump. An average of 44 percent supported impeachment, with 51 percent opposed, averaging across a dozen October and November polls in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Wisconsin. That’s a flip from an average of national polls that finds support for impeachment narrowly edging opposition, 47 percent to 43 percent.
The depressed support for impeachment in key states was first signaled by a series of New York Times-Siena College polls conducted in mid-October, which found between 51 and 53 percent opposing impeachment in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
But several other polls also have found that support for impeachment in key 2020 states lags the country overall. At the most negative, a mid-November Marquette University Law School poll in Wisconsin found 40 percent of registered voters support impeaching and removing Trump, while 53 percent are opposed. Fox News polls in North Carolina and Nevada showed opposition to impeachment outpacing support by eight and seven points, respectively. The best results in key states have shown voters divided over impeachment, such as a Muhlenberg College poll of Pennsylvania voters.
Obviously these are states that Democrats are going to need to carry if they want to take back the White House in 2020. But in the meantime, Trump’s approval ratings remain steady and fairly unchanged since the impeachment inquiry began in earnest. The indication being that public hearings, witness testimony, and even on-going revelations about the president’s questionable behavior, untruthfulness or anything negative continues to have little impact:
In Gallup polling from mid-September to mid-November, Trump’s approval has tiptoed between 39 percent and 43 percent approving. In Quinnipiac University polls, the story is no different: Between 38 percent and 41 percent of registered voters approved of Trump from late September to late November.
Here are a few observations about impeachment and the 2020 election from three familiar swing states:
From Wisconsin:
About a third of people are saying they’re paying a lot of attention, but a third are saying little or no attention. So there’s, you know, a gap in the sort of degree to which this is a riveting exercise. And the other thing I’d follow up on is that the kinds of issues that we saw motivating voters in 2018 like health care and preexisting conditions are things that are largely absent from the discussion right now as impeachment dominates. When those proceedings are over, presumably we’ll come back to more the issues of the Democratic primary and shaping the fall election…Democrats favor impeachment, but not as nearly universally as Republicans oppose it. And the modest number of independents are a bit more opposed to impeachment than in favor of it, though the gap there’s not large.
From Michigan:
[P]eople here have made it very clear that the impeachment hearings are a political campaign. I don’t get a sense that they’re connecting it right now with anything except the 2016 election and the 2020 election…Trump and his reality show team are master marketers who have convinced his base that he is responsible for everything good in America, whether it’s legacy victories such as low unemployment rates here to the myth that farmers and autoworkers are doing better. No one’s really paying attention to issues because the issue right now is just Donald Trump, and that is not the way I think Democrats can win. Impeachment should not have been a campaign.
From Pennsylvania:
Republican suburban voters – the ones who really have had a problem with Trump’s comportment and either sat it out in 2016 or voted with them – but in 2018, they decided they wanted to put the brakes on him. They’re really struggling now with these new congressional members who ran on, you know, a different kind of politics – who ran on health care, who ran on, you know, getting things done. And they’re frustrated with this vote that they made.
Not that they like Trump any more – they still don’t like him. But they’re frustrated that the vote that they did give to the Democrats has turned out to be sort of opening up the road towards impeachment, and they don’t like that.
Can Democrats have already forgotten the brutal experiences of Hillary Clinton in those three states during the last presidential election?
–Dana