On Morning of Impeachment Vote, Poll Shows Trump Approval at Highest Point in Nearly 3 Years
If the intent of the Democrats’ push to impeach President Donald Trump is to tarnish him and thereby hurt his re-election efforts, recent polling suggests it’s having the opposite effect.
On Wednesday morning, the day of the House impeachment vote, Trump’s average approval rating by the political data analysis site FiveThirtyEight was 43.3 percent.
The last time it was approximately that level (43.5 percent) was March 16, 2017, just 55 days into his presidency.
A Gallup survey released Wednesday shows Trump with a 45 percent approval rating, just one point shy of his highest mark ever registered with the polling firm.
Meanwhile, support for impeachment is underwater, with 46 percent backing impeachment and removal from office and 51 percent opposing the move. The latter figure is up 5 percentage points since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opened the formal inquiry into Trump.
Even frequent detractors of the president, such as CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza, are not blind to the fact that the impeachment effort may be working in the president’s favor.
In a piece titled “Warning lights are flashing for Democrats as they prepare to impeach Trump,” Cillizza cited CNN’s “Poll of Polls” — an average of the six most recent national polls conducted Dec. 4 to 15 — showing 46 percent favor impeachment and removal, while 49 percent are against.
Perhaps even more troubling for Democrats, a USA Today/Suffolk University poll published this week found the president beating all the current Democratic presidential favorites.
Trump now leads all 5 leading Democrat contenders in new Suffolk/USA Today Poll
Trump 44 (+3)
Biden 41Trump 44 (+5)
Sanders 39Trump 45 (+8)
Warren 37Trump 43 (+9)
Bloomberg 34Trump 43 (+10)
Buttigieg 33Americans see through Pelosi and Schiff’s impeachment sham!!
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) December 17, 2019
On Wednesday morning, Trump responded to the prospect of being impeached, tweeting, “Can you believe that I will be impeached today by the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats, AND I DID NOTHING WRONG! A terrible Thing. Read the Transcripts. This should never happen to another President again. Say a PRAYER!”
Can you believe that I will be impeached today by the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats, AND I DID NOTHING WRONG! A terrible Thing. Read the Transcripts. This should never happen to another President again. Say a PRAYER!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 18, 2019
One of ironies of the Democrats’ impeachment push is that it has made Trump more of a sympathetic figure: the victim of the Democrats’ unhinged partisan rage.
The president was the villain in their narrative before: the racist (Democrats accuse all Republican presidents of being racist), the colluder with Russia, who was hellbent on undermining American democracy.
After special counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month investigation failed to turn up proof Trump was in league with Russia, the Democrats needed a new story to tell. They latched on to the Ukraine quid pro quo narrative, in which he supposedly withheld U.S. aid to pressure that country to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.
That’s what the whistleblower claimed anyway, before Trump released the call transcript showing no quid pro quo. Democrats were forced to retreat multiple times, first to implied quid pro quo, then to bribery and on to their current amorphous “abuse of power.”
The polls prove that Americans are increasing coming to see this impeachment for what is really is: a raw exercise of political power by the House majority, with neither the law nor the facts on its side.
Let’s hope at the ballot box next November — the only poll that matters — Americans will return Trump to office and remove the Democrats from the position of trust they have so wantonly abused.
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