Voters Are Warming to Impeaching Trump

Perhaps Trump fatigue is finally taking hold or perhaps the Ukrainian shakedown and requests for yet another foreign intervention into U.S. elections has awakened the heretofore lethargic, but two polls suggest that a plurality of Americans support seeing Trump impeached and ultimately removed from office.  One can only wonder if support for impeachment will grow if Democrats are smart in how they conduct hearings and properly expose Trump's criminality and abuse of his office for personal gain with no thought about the best interests of the nation (in Trump's narcissistic mind, the two are one and the same much like dictators and despots of the past).  Whatever the cause for growing support for impeachment, it is seemingly a good sign that decency and a thirst for honesty are not totally dead in today's America.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this shift in voter opinion.  Here are excerpts:

Two new polls suggest that American voters are warming to the idea of impeaching President Trump. According to a Morning Consult poll conducted from September 24 to 26, 43 percent of the public now backs impeachment proceedings. That figure has increased seven points from an earlier Morning Consult poll, carried out from September 20 to 22. Meanwhile, an NPR–PBS NewsHour–Marist poll, conducted the day before the whistle-blower report became public, finds that voters are roughly split on the subject; 49 percent support impeachment, and 46 percent do not.

One possible reason for the increase in public support for impeachment is so obvious it almost doesn’t need an explanation. Trump is not having a very good week: As a call record and now a declassified whistle-blower report attest, Trump asked the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate the son of a political enemy — Hunter Biden — with the assistance of the Justice Department and Rudy Giuliani. Trump later tried to withhold military aid from Ukraine. The unspooling crisis encourages talk of impeachment, and a number of House Democrats have come out in support of beginning the process.

By now throwing her support behind an impeachment inquiry, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has helped shift public opinion in tandem with media coverage of Trump’s misconduct. But she is an extremely late convert to the cause of impeachment, despite the president’s corruption and alleged sexual violence. Her ambivalence provided shelter to more moderate and conservative members of the party, who think an impeachment inquiry would cost them their seats. Whether these members will follow Pelosi’s lead is an open question.

Though no one can say with certainty that voter enthusiasm for impeachment will continue to grow, the president’s handling of the Ukraine scandal has clearly harmed him. A good number of Democrats already seem to realize that the story leaves them with no option but to endorse impeachment proceedings.

But there are still stragglers. Some, like conservative Henry Cuellar of Texas, equivocated even as evidence of presidential misconduct became increasingly difficult to ignore. Cuellar, who is currently locked in a primary battle with progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros, has said that he’ll support proceedings “if investigations prove that impeachment is the necessary course of action,” the Texas Tribune reports.

The events of this month make Tlaib look prescient and underscore the risks of the party’s fearful approach to impeachment. We’ve been here before: Morning Consult says that this month’s poll numbers “nearly match” its findings in August 2018, amid the convictions of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen. Public opinion is malleable, but Democrats behave too often as if the opposite is true. The window is open, and they can’t afford their old ambivalence.

One can only hope Congressional Democrats are re-watching the tapes from the Watergate investigation and formulating an approach that will convince all but the racists and religious fanatics of Trump's base that it is time for the cancer in the White House to be removed.