The Progressive Daily Beacon has a good round up of the polls, and they are encouraging.

The most significant result is from Zogby International, showing that 52% of Americans think the President should be impeached over the NSA issue. This comes on the heels of last June’s Zogby poll that showed 42% supported impeachment if the President knowingly lied about his reasons for going to war in Iraq.

We can only imagine what would happen to such numbers if the Democrats held a branch of Congress and could compel testimony from people in the administration. And, on that score, things also look promising:

With mid-term elections less than a year away, a new Harris Poll finds that Republicans may have their work cut out for them. According to the poll, if the election for Congress were held today, more than two in five (43%) adults would vote for the Democratic candidate, while one-third (34%) would vote for the Republican candidate, 14 percent would vote for someone else, and nine percent are undecided.

Other interesting findings regarding the congressional ballot include:

* There is currently a significant gender gap with women strongly supporting the Democratic candidate (48% would support the Democratic candidate and 34% would support the Republican candidate) and men more divided (37% would support the Democratic candidate and 34% would support the Republican candidate).

* Another issue the Republican Party is faced with is that their candidate shows signs of weakness among both conservatives (51% would vote for the Republican candidate) and moderates (2%), two important segments of their coalition. On the other hand, a Democratic candidate currently draws 66 percent of the liberal vote and 47 percent of the moderate vote.

* The Democratic candidate also appears to have a stronger commitment among its base than does the Republican candidate (83% of Democrats would support their candidate vs. 78% of Republicans would support their candidate).

So, why are the Dems still behaving so timidly? Maybe because of conflicting polls?

First, polls have shown that the public doesn’t care all that much about the [NSA] program, which permits domestic wiretapping of phone calls and e-mail without first obtaining a court order.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll found that about 50 percent consider wiretapping an acceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism, and 65 percent said it’s more important to investigate threats than safeguard privacy.

The same poll found that 32 percent believe personal privacy rights trump the need to investigate possible threats.

Either the public cares enough about the NSA program to impeach the President or they don’t much care. Zogby says the former, ABC/WP says the latter. Who do you believe?

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