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Independents souring on impeachment underscores risk for Democrats
By Jonathan Easley
The Hill – Published 11/24/2019

New public opinion polls are moving against Democrats on impeachment as independents sour on the House inquiry and increasingly express opposition to the hearings that have consumed Washington in recent weeks.

The new data comes as a surprise to Democrats, many of whom believe witnesses have offered damning testimony about President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.

Witnesses have testified that Trump pressed Ukraine’s leaders to conduct investigations of the energy company Burisma Holdings — which was seen as code for probes of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, given the younger Biden’s work for the company as a board member.

There has also been testimony that security aid for Ukraine was delayed to put more pressure on that country’s government. Other witnesses have castigated Trump for pursuing conspiracy theories that Ukraine and not Russia was a major player in electoral interference in 2016.

An impeachment vote in the House seems inevitable, but it does not appear that any GOP lawmakers will back an article of impeachment. And it remains to be seen whether voters will support the Democratic action or punish the party for going forward with impeachment.

“There’s always a disconnect between Washington and what people are thinking out in the states,” said Dick Harpootlian, the former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party and a surrogate for former Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.

And Democrats have some worries about impeachment fatigue.

“After three years, the country was sick of hearing about Russia, and now the average American either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about the case we’re making on Ukraine,” said one Democratic fundraiser.

According to the FiveThirtyEight average of national polls, support for impeachment has shrunk from 50.3 percent in mid-October to 46.3 percent presently, while opposition has risen from 43.8 percent to 45.6 percent.

Among independents in the FiveThirtyEight average, support for impeachment topped out at 47.7 percent in late October but has sunk to 41 percent over the past three weeks.

YouGov is among the polls registering that decline, with independent support for impeachment dropping from 39 percent earlier this month to 35 percent now and opposition increasing from 35 percent to 40 percent.

An Emerson University survey found an even more extreme flip among independents.

In October, independents supported impeachment 48 percent to 35 percent in Emerson’s polling. In the new poll released this week, independents opposed it by a 49 percent to 34 percent margin. In that time, overall support for impeaching Trump swung from 48 percent in favor and 44 percent against to 45 percent in opposition to impeachment and 43 percent in favor.

The latest Morning Consult survey was the third poll released this week to register a flip among independents. That survey also registered a new low among all voters in favor of impeachment at 48 percent.

But perhaps most alarming for Democrats is a new survey of Wisconsin from Marquette University. In Wisconsin, a key swing state in next year’s election, Marquette found that 40 percent supported impeaching Trump and removing him from office, while 53 percent opposed it. In October, before the hearings began, support was at 44 percent and opposition was at 51 percent.

The Marquette survey found Trump leading in Wisconsin against three top Democratic challengers after trailing all of them in the previous poll.

Support for impeachment among Republicans and independents in the survey was mostly steady, but support among Democrats dropped by 7 points.

Marquette pollster Charles Franklin described the shift as modest and said it could be driven by voters viewing impeachment as an extreme measure. Franklin said that when former Gov. Scott Walker (R) was being recalled in Wisconsin, even some Democrats who despised Walker were conflicted about the recall effort and viewed it as an overreach.

“It was surprising to find that Democrats are a little less supportive of impeachment now. They appear a little less unified in their opposition,” Franklin said. “It moves the race from being a small Democratic lead that was mostly inside the margin of error to a small Trump lead that is mostly inside the margin of error and basically reaffirms Wisconsin’s status as a battleground state.”

The Marquette survey follows a New York Times–Siena College poll that found majorities in the key swing states of Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Florida oppose removing the president from office through impeachment. Majorities or pluralities do support an investigation of Trump, however.

“All of these numbers are consistent with other trends that suggest Democrats are losing the impeachment debate, particularly in swing states and districts,” said Chris Wilson, a GOP pollster and president of WPA Intelligence.

“If the hearings have eroded support even slightly, and the national data suggests that, then this Marquette poll is completely in line with an emerging picture where impeachment is actually helping the president in key swing states,” he added.

Many Democrats are unmoved by the new data, believing that they’re doing the right thing and that impeachment will not be their core message heading into the general election anyway. On the campaign trail, the 2020 Democratic White House hopefuls rarely talk about or get asked about impeachment.

Democratic strategist Andrew Feldman pointed to recent elections in Kentucky and Louisiana, two deep-red states where Democrats won contested gubernatorial contests this month, as evidence their economic message is breaking through.

“This is an inside the Beltway conversation that’s dominating news here in Washington but I don’t put much weight in these polls because it’s not what we’re talking about in the communities where real people are concerned about health care, economic inequality and student debt,” Feldman said. “If we lose focus of those issues, we’ll be in trouble, but until then, I’m confident people understand what’s at stake and which party is working to make their lives better.”

But Republicans are crowing, believing that Democrats have made a massive miscalculation on impeachment.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) initially resisted calls for impeachment, worried that it might cost the party hard-won seats in districts that Trump carried in 2016.

“Pelosi didn’t want to do this. … If you are one of those 31 Democrats running in Trump districts, you don’t want to be on the record voting for impeachment,” said one Trump campaign official.

“They are actually making the president out to be a martyr, which is not easy. American voters are a lot smarter than the Washington elites and left-stream media give them credit for. They really are. They have a pretty good BS meter, and they smell BS,” the official added.

View the full article here.

The Atlanta debate was outstanding for Stacey Abrams, who lost her race for governor last year but was name-checked seemingly at every turn. But how did it go for the ten candidates on stage? Not well. As my left-honorable teammate Bradley Honan, who heads up Honan Research Strategies (HSG) and compiles the data we used for our late-night deck, hashtag: #debatefatigue.

So with a good night’s sleep, and the added benefit of some of the instant reaction, how did this go?

Ratings for the Democrats’ fifth presidential debate were sharply down despite it being historic for having an all-female moderating panel, and being politically interesting because Elizabeth Warren polls show that she’s cratering nationally behind a rejuvenated Bernie Sanders, while Buttigieg blew up her lead in Iowa.

It even underperformed on a night where DC politicos weren’t focused on the Washington Nationals run to their first World Series championship.

Aside from Andrew Yang, were they missing Beto? Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Of course, not. Maybe it’s because viewers saw this already, have had their fill of Trump-bashing through impeachment, and decided that re-watching the second episode of Disney’s “The Mandalorian” was a better bet for their collective sanity because Baby Yoda waved his (pronoun check) hand and we’re all obsessed. Pre-order yours soon!

So, what happened on stage?

First, the moderators did their level best to give Warren a chance to get back into the race. According to the Washington Post, she got the most talking time at 13.4 minutes, followed by Buttigieg at 12.8 minutes, Sanders had 11.8 minutes, while Booker/Harris/Biden had slightly less.

Source: The Washington Post

Our Twitter data, however, tells a different story about Biden… and it’s not a good look. As in September and October, Biden was the target of the most tweets during the debate, this time with 151,4000. The next closest candidate was Sanders with 71,300 directed tweets, less than half. Biden was down from October by about 20,000 tweets while Sanders was up by just about the same.

Biggest loser? Warren. She was down by two-thirds. The slow slide into electoral irrelevance may have begun on Wednesday night.

Here’s the full picture from slide 11:

What you’ll also notice is this: only three out of the ten candidates actually drew more interest this time: Sanders, Harris, and Buttigieg. Sanders was on his well-worn game, while Harris was more aggressive and sharper than in previous debates (more on that in a moment), and Buttigieg knew his was going to draw more direct hits, which happened late in the debate.

Tulsi Gabbard, who took aim at another rising candidate, fizzled. She actually drew fewer tweets than in October and Buttigieg was well-prepped for the attack with a stinging rebuttal that in the moment felt like a draw to me, which was a win for Mayor Pete. Harris jumped into the fray with the most retweeted post of the night from a candidate, with about 3,300 retweets and 14,400 likes:

By our count, Harris had three of the top five most retweeted posts and Sanders had two, dinging Biden for his support for the Iraq War (again) and supporting the 26th Amendment, which was ratified the year I was born, lowering the voting age to 18. The tweet got him about 1,800 retweets and 15,300 that evening, but not exactly setting Twitter on fire.

If the retweeting vibe was a little more casual that evening, the sentiment was strongly negative, even for Twitter. None of the candidates compiled by HSG came across with a net-positive sentiment. The one who came closest was minus 2x and he spoke the least.

Lest we feel too badly for Gabbard, and we shouldn’t, the retiring Hawaiian congresswoman was the most searched candidate on Google in 48 out of 50 states. Just conjecture but maybe folks are simply wondering who the Democrat self-hater was, let alone interest in supporting her. My hope is we can get the Ds vs. Rs on that data but Google doesn’t appear to be in the kind of mood to share its data lately. The mini-step for Buttigieg: he led in Iowa and neighboring Nebraska.

What this all means moving forward is anyone’s guess. Mine is that the next debate in December will be watched by even fewer Americans, who are gearing up for what actually matters to us: the holidays. When the political calendar turns in 2020 and, perhaps, the DNC finds a way to cull the field, maybe there will be more interest. In the meantime, I’m grateful that our fellow voters have better things to do than to slog through these slow-moving, humorless (except Bernie), must-miss TV debates.

To view the full breakdown of the debate, click here.

To follow Michael Cohen on Twitter, click here.

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Jack Dorsey, chief executive of Twitter, unleashed a frenzy of commentary when he went Pontius Pilate and effectively washed his hands of the false advertising problem online by announcing his platform would no longer take political ads. But perhaps the most alarming reaction came from Federal Election Commission Chair Ellen Weintraub, who called on social media giants to “stop the practice of microtargeting” ads on their platforms.

As someone who has worked on multiple state and federal election campaigns, I found such comments from the highest campaign regulatory official in the country counterproductive and anti-democratic. Such a radical proposal would limit speech, reward millionaire candidates, protect incumbents and, worst of all, limit the newfound interest and participation in U.S. elections.

Since the adoption of individualized campaign analytics, turnout has skyrocketed. 2016 saw a 6 percent bump in turnout from 2012 — an increase of more than 8 million voters. In the 2018 midterms, 35 million more voters participated than in the 2014 midterms, and 27 million more voters than in 2010 (despite the tea party wave that year).

Unlike typical wave elections, in which one side is motivated and the other side depressed, campaigns from both parties have increased interest through direct, data-driven appeals that spoke directly to each voter. More reluctant voters, previously ignored by most campaigns, are now included in digital advertising that address them directly. Developing new ways to convince people that voting is worthwhile is the primary task of campaign sciences.

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