Posted on 12/11/2019 6:59:30 AM PST by Diana in Wisconsin
A funny thing happened on the way to President Trump’s impeachment. Somewhere along the way, House Democrats lost the support of the American people.
When they announced Articles of Impeachment against Trump on Tuesday, they did so with the support of just 48% of the American people (a number that is dramatically skewed by the fact that a near-unanimous 87.3% of Democrats want him impeached and removed from office), while the RealClearPolitics average of polls finds that 46.2% of the country does not want the President impeached and removed.
Amazingly, support for impeachment has gone down as impeachment hearings have attempted to paint a clear picture of impeachable offenses.
Obviously, the absence of any actual firsthand evidence of wrongdoing impacted public opinion, but newly released polling from key battleground states suggests that something more might be at play.
On October 8th, after weeks of breathless media coverage of the Ukraine scandal, support for impeachment hit a high of 52.2% in the RealClearPolitics average. On November 10th, two days before hearings began, support for it was at 51%.
After two weeks of hearings in the House Intelligence Committee, though, that average dipped to 48%-46% support for impeachment, where it remains to this day.
Republican polling firm Firehouse Strategies reports this week that the impeachment inquiry seems to be helping President Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, where he is now beating every single leading Democrat in hypothetical matchups.
Not only does a clear majority of voters in these three critical states oppose impeachment and removal from office, President Trump has reversed declining numbers as the impeachment inquiry has taken off.
Nowhere has this shift been more pronounced than in Wisconsin. In March, former Vice President Joe Biden (who has been damaged by his association with the Ukraine scandal) led President Trump by a whopping 12 percentage points. Now, President Trump leads him by nine.
What could have caused a 21-point swing in just 10 months? Why did it come during a period in which logic would seem to dictate that Trump would lose support as evidence of his supposed wrongdoing is made public? And why is this odd trend so especially pronounced in Wisconsin?
The answer is what might be dubbed “The Scott Walker Effect.”
In November of 2010, then-Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker swept into the Governor’s Mansion with a 52.3%-46.5% victory over Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. A little over a month after his inauguration the following January, Walker introduced a comprehensive overhaul of collective bargaining for Wisconsin’s public employees known as Act 10.
Anyone who was in Wisconsin or even had a passing familiarity with the state knows what happened next. Public employee unions went ballistic, and more than 100,000 angry demonstrators descended on the State Capitol building for weeks on end. Democrats in the State Senate fled to Illinois to avoid a vote on the bill. Once it was signed, liberal activists immediately organized recall efforts against state legislators who supported the bill.
The anger didn’t subside, and more than a year later, Walker himself faced a recall election. But a funny thing happened on the way to his ouster. He won with an even greater percentage of the vote (53.1%-46.3%). Even more shockingly, he gained 206,644 votes over his total from November of 2010, when he faced the same opponent.
This increase is The Scott Walker Effect: Voter backlash to a perceived unjust effort to oust a leader over political differences. In other words, while voter turnout increased overall from November 2010 to June 2012, Walker’s dramatic rise came largely from voters expressing their dissatisfaction that Democrats vindictively abused the recall process to get rid of a Governor whom they simply didn’t like.
Recall elections were traditionally used as a remedy for malfeasance in public office—not as revenge for an unpopular policy—and the widespread belief in Wisconsin that Democrats were simply bitter about losing the battle over Act 10 (and the 2010 election) helped make Walker the first Governor to ever survive a recall election.
It seems fairly obvious that the Scott Walker Effect is now driving impeachment polling, especially here in Wisconsin. Did 21% of Wisconsinites suddenly change their minds about President Trump since March, or do they recognize impeachment as yet another tired recall effort?
Just as troubling for Democrats, the impeachment push seems to be galvanizing Republican support for President Trump just as the recall effort did for Governor Walker. Those who might have been on the fence about Walker and voted for him almost out of a sense of obligation to vote Republican suddenly had a reason to back him with everything they had. They knocked on doors, they made phone calls, and they put up yard signs…even if they had never done so before. They felt it was their duty to save Walker from a fundamentally unjust process.
And now Republicans are doing the same for President Trump. 89% oppose impeachment and removal from office and 90% approve of the job he is doing. Nearly all of them recognize impeachment for what it is—an effort to politically weaken a President (there is no chance the Senate will vote to convict and remove him from office) less than a year before he stands for re-election. A process reserved for actual malfeasance in office is being cheapened with imagined offenses that barely mask naked political hatred.
The dramatic and seemingly paradoxical turn in support for impeachment reveals this, and once House Democrats’ overreach inevitably backfires, they will have only themselves—and the Scott Walker Effect—to blame.
“...the RealClearPolitics average of polls finds that 46.2% of the country does not want the President impeached and removed.”
Does that mean the majority DOES want him impeached and removed? That doesn’t jibe with the other stat saying only 48% favor impeachment.
MI and PA are pivotal...as are FL,NC,IN and OH. Given that DJT carried OH by 10 points I doubt he needs to worry there.But he might want to focus on GA,TX and AZ as well.
One would hope that this conduct opens voter’s eyes to the nature of Democrats. They’ve admitted that they’ll continue with the charade even if President Trump is re-elected.
The only way to put an and to this is to ensure they’re only a minority party after the next election.
Maybe not.It could be 46% for,46% against and 8% undecided.
The average voter probably doesn’t have a clue what the two articles of ‘peachment actually are.
Support may well drop further once they find out how weak they are (not that the MSM will be any help in that regard).
Biden NEVER led by 12 points. All of that was a lie.
Yes, that was a possibility that I thought of but didn’t include in my post. Still, it seems unlikely that the percentage of people favoring both impeachment AND removal would exceed impeachment alone, don’t you think? I have to wonder if there’s typo in there somewhere.
There a certain segment of the population busy getting on with their lives who always tell pollster “don’t know/don’t care”.
The article was spot on. I was working in Madison, Wisconsin during the recall, in the state DOT building as a contractor, and I saw the whole thing play out.
A LOT of money was spent, more by the recall movement. Walker’s own style is quite different than Trump’s, but it worked for him. He mostly stuck by his guns, was able to keep most of the Senate in line (occasionally some guy named Luther would break ranks), but never lost his cool or his mild, phlegmatic nature.
Here’s the important part: the recall people certainly got their people to the polls, turnout was high, especially in a year where there seemed to be half a dozen special elections (judges, etc.) but Walker was able to get his people out, too. The Walker-pushes-old-ladies-off-the-cliff meme was needed to gin up support, but it also annoyed people into going the other way.
Walker, like Trump, was also able to use boutique lefty issues against traditionally Democrat demographic groups. Door County (northern WI) is the poor non-urban part of the state. The Dems were against allowing the reopening of the iron mines. The who actually lived there wanted them opened. Walker received new pockets of support from Door County, and other places who historically voted Democrat, but wanted good Wisconsin style industrial jobs. (Wisconsinites are called badgers originally for the mining industry. The animal associated with UWisc was just a happy play on the theme.)
Like most people in WI, most Americans are fair-minded.
What Pelosi, Schiffhead, and Nadless are doing is anything but fair.
The left doesn’t understand this difference and it’s what is killing the democrat party.
Are these the same polls showing Hillary cruising to a clear victory with 98.327% confidence.
Then Walker tried to run for president and overnight it was all over, including his governorship.
President Hillary _believes_ Wisconsin polls:
https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/10/politics/clinton-leads-trump-wisconsin-poll/index.html
I think you are confused about Door County, where the economy is almost completely based on tourism. You seem to be thinking of northern Wisconsin counties near the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the Iron Range, near Duluth/Superior.
Trump may have flipped supporters from Door County but not because of mining. There’s not enough room in Door to dig a mine without hitting a condo anyway.
Considering that all polls are political BS, this means that it is much worse for the Democrats than we previously thought. I have calculated that the press and the Democrats are able to manipulate polls by a factor of about 10% by the way the questions are asked and who is asked. That means that probably 75% of the people think that this is utter BS...
Good summary! In my experience just about every voter who lived outside of Dane and Milwaukee counties saw the recall for what it was. Sour Grapes!
Add to that, the TRASHING of our Capitol Building to the tune of many of millions of dollars in tax dollars for repairs, and the Dems DAILY tantrums at the Capitol turned many off and basically enraged the rest of us.
And now the dust has settled and he’s on to better things. :)
We’re stuck with ‘One and Done’ Evers for the next three years, but he’s impotent as we control the Senate and the Assembly, Thank God!
We Badgers are good at hunkering down and waiting out the threats to our ‘environment.’
Speaking of which, Beau was out hunting (always!) the other night and saw a real live Badger for the first time in 30 years - and he is someone that would rather be in the field than anywhere else.
Agreed. It wasn’t the right time. I’m hoping he heads for the Senate and knocks out Tammy Baldwin, which would be Suh-WEET! :)
You are right. It’s been a few years. I should have said Iron CO\ounty.
Scott Walker would make an excellent US Senator, but is he even interested in making another statewide run?
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