Public Opinion Turning Against Mueller, Impeachment

Have President Trump’s uncompromising denunciations of Bob Mueller’s “witch hunt” been effective? It appears so, based on this USA Today/Suffolk University poll. Currently, 50% of Americans consider Mueller’s investigation to be a witch hunt, while 47% disagree. Independents believe Trump has been the victim of a witch hunt, by 54%/42%.

And that is before Mueller releases his findings. While the press will spin Mueller’s report in an anti-Trump direction, the one unavoidable conclusion will be that after searching high and low, Mueller and his team of Democratic Party partisans couldn’t find any evidence of collusion. That should increase the number of voters who think the two-year-long investigation was a witch hunt all along.

Support for impeachment is fading as well. The USA Today poll finds that currently, only 28% of respondents think the House should seriously consider impeaching the president. That is down ten points since October.

These trends put Democratic presidential candidates in a difficult position. Their party’s base demands ever more insane denunciations of President Trump, even as the larger public is growing more sympathetic to the view that attacks on the president have gone too far. Likewise, House Democrats’ intention to spend the next 20 months investigating the president’s family and businesses appears to be at odds with the public mood.

I think the Democrats’ over-the-top conduct has helped to move public opinion in Trump’s favor, along with the fact, as now appears clear, that claims of collusion by Simpson and Steele were fabricated. I also think President Trump has helped himself by unequivocally denouncing the Democrats and the the Mueller investigation, on Twitter and elsewhere.

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