Poll Shows Impeachment Hearings Getting Icy Reception from the Group that Matters Most: Independents
Adam Schiff & Co. are preaching to the choir.
The Democrats who launched an “impeachment inquiry” against President Donald Trump without a single Republican vote in support no doubt intended to use the proceedings as a showcase to bring in independent voters to their cause.
With the country basically divided between Republicans who still support Trump in overwhelming numbers and Democrats who still haven’t gotten over the 2016 election, independent voters are the key to the 2020 vote.
But if independents’ reaction to the televised hearings that are bringing impeachment into every living room, bar and airport terminal in the land are any indication, Democrats are falling considerably short.
In fact, many independents aren’t paying attention at all.
That’s the result of a Reuters/Ipsos poll last week that found independent voters have paid scant attention to the hearings Democrats hoped would rivet the nation.
Only 19 percent of independents actually watched or listened to some of the hearings, the poll found.
Seventeen percent reported they watched or listened to streaming news summaries; 30 percent said they read or heard news summaries online or in the newspaper or on the radio.
That’s not exactly a national obsession — and likely nowhere near the amount of interest Democrats hoped to kindle with this dog-and-pony show.
While Democrats like to point to the Nixon impeachment as their guide in the effort to oust Trump, the 37th president only resigned from office when it was clear he’d lost the support of his own party.
Trump, by contrast, is widely supported among Republicans — an Iowa poll released Monday found a sky-high 85 percent job approval rating for the 45th president among Republicans, which is actually higher than it was in March, according to the Des Moines Register.
And the percentage of those who said they will definitely vote for Trump’s re-election had risen by 9 points, to 79 percent, according to the poll by the Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll.
This is in Iowa, where Democratic primary candidates have been filling the airwaves and other media outlets with ads touting their own credentials and bashing Trump ahead of the Feb. 3 caucuses that are likely to be pivotal in the nomination fight.
“I think he’s doing a tremendous job, really, as far as I’m concerned,” poll respondent Wayne Sparker, 82, told the Register
“… I’ve been a Democrat all my life, but when he ran for office, when I could see what he was standing up for — for the borders and the different solutions he brought forth — I felt that I definitely needed to vote for him.”
Those are the voters Trump needs to win in 2020 — and they’re the kind of voters Democrats were trying to reach with this Adam Schiff’s impeachment circus.
From the looks of things, and despite the massive help of the mainstream media, the main crowd Democrats are reaching with the televised hearings have already chosen sides.
