The House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment inqiry is already worrying moderate Democrats who need to hang on to their seats in contested races, but could it also be crumbling the Democrats’ hopes of retaking the White House?
A new report from the Associated Press suggests that voters in battleground states like Wisconsin — which ultimately cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election — are turned off by the impeachment hearings and believe Democrats, not Republicans, should suffer for the impeachment effort.
“There’s not a lot that Republicans and Democrats in this political battlefield agree on, but the impeachment probe into President Donald Trump may have surfaced one: The public hearings aren’t moving the needle,” AP said Wednesday.
“After 30 hours of televised hearings, a dozen witnesses, at least a couple of major revelations and scores of tweeted rebuttals, voters in Wisconsin and nationwide aren’t changing their minds about removing the Republican president,” the outlet continued, citing recent polling. “If they came into the inquiry defensive of Trump, they likely still are. And if they were inclined to think the president abused his power, they didn’t need televised hearings to prove it.”
So far, much of the reporting on the public’s reception to Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) two week investigation into whether the President and his allies inked a “quid-pro-quo” agreement with Urkainian officials, trading millions of dollars in foreign aid for assurances that Ukrainian prosecutors would announce an investigation into whether former Vice President Joe Biden abused his office and pressured Ukrainian officials not to investigate a company on which his son, Hunter, served on the board of directors, has focused on national polling. Americans remain as divided on the issue as before the hearings, according to FiveThirtyEight, though support for impeaching the president, particularly among independents, has ticked down markedly.
The Associated Press says the same is true inside battleground states, where just a handful of voters hold the key to President Trump’s re-election. – READ MORE
