Nancy Pelosi’s strategy of letting Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell twist in the wind appears to be working.
Public support for Donald Trump‘s removal from office is the highest it has ever been, according to a new poll.
Fifty-five per cent of those asked said they were in favour of the US president’s conviction by the Senate, a figure which has shot up from 48 per cent the week before.
Meanwhile, the number of people against Mr Trump’s removal has dropped to an all-time low, according to the MSN poll.
On Christmas Day, 40 per cent were opposed to the Senate voting to convict the president, who has been impeached over his dealings with Ukraine and an alleged subsequent attempt to obstruct congress.
The gap between the two views has become much wider since last week, when there was little to divide them (48 per cent in favour of Mr Trump’s removal, 47 per cent against).
The percentage of respondents who neither supported nor opposed conviction also grew.
David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research, said the numbers of people shifting from opposition to removal to “don’t know” was significant. “When you follow polling daily, you learn people rarely make big jumps from Opposition to Support,” he said.
“This polling is a clear sign that [the] Republican policy of complete obstruction is not selling well to [the] voting public.”
The number that really matters is 67. That’s the percentage of senators who need to vote to convict Donald Trump in order for him to be removed from office. But 55 percent is not too shabby for the moment, and the trend is heading in the right direction.
If things continue moving this way, eventually we’ll see some Republicans senators start to object to McConnell’s no-witness strategy. And if that wall crumbles, anything is possible.
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What would happen if Pelosi simply held the impeachment and never submitted it to the senate until after the election? Does it become invalid at some point?
What happens is Trump keeps saying crazy stuff that gets crazier and crazier as his dementia progresses, so more and more people start thinking WTF – time is not helping the GOP.
I assume the articles expire on Jan 2 2021 when the new Congress takes office.
Read his recent rant about wind power, he already has the mentality of a small child.
That makes sense to me. If so, and we can’t get the votes needed let them just hang there and let Trump go nuts about them.
Okay, as long as there’s no expectation that having a mentally incompetent president will significantly harm the Republican agenda. (See: Reagan, Ronald & Wilson, Woodrow.)
Interesting legal/constitutional question…which I’ll leave for any legal/constitutional experts in the pond to answer.
The best theory as to what Pelosi is doing that I’ve seen is that she’s relying on Trump’s massively vulnerable ego to put pressure on Senate Republicans. She’s already sent Trump an invitation to deliver the State of the Union speech on Feb. 4. Trump is *not* going to want to deliver that speech with impeachment hanging over his head. Therefore (this theory goes), he’ll become increasingly erratic and will (directly and indirectly) put greater pressure on McConnell and the Senate Republican caucus to hold a trial and have it over before Feb. 4…even if it means calling witnesses and subpoenaing documents.
The whole Democratic caucus is probably salivating about the scenario of Trump giving the SOTU with the impeachment undelivered to the Senate.
No matter what it was going the be the most bonkers SOTU in history. Trump will now use it to exonerate himself, so now we are at stratospheric levels of bonkers. He’ll probably try to call a witness during the speech.
Absolutely no reason for Pelosi to submit.
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No, there is no time limit at all on the articles of impeachment. They do not become invalid.
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Sigh…a single poll, and an internet poll at that. And the numbers from the previous week indicated a *dip* in support…so the “10% increase” is mostly just a return to the baseline of 2 weeks ago.
Maybe this is a leading indicator of a change that we will see in the polling averages, but most likely it is just noise. In any case, to make any argument at all on the basis of a single poll is a bad idea.
What we can say, based on the polling averages, is that conviction is not losing support. So thus far there is no evidence that Pelosi’s strategy is the wrong one. More than that we will have to wait and see.
Look, we have crossed the Rubicon on this, and there is no point in agonizing over the goddam daily/weekly polls. The die is cast, and it’s once more into the breach, good friends! (are these enough aphorisms for everyone?)
As the reactionary right has picked up on, one can’t declare that Der Trumper is an existential danger to the republic, yet not be willing to try him on the charges because the Gravedigger of Democracy is running the show in the senate—which was a rather well-known fact. Pelosi’s “hold them back” strategy has already succeeded in shutting up both the Gravedigger and the loathsome sycophant Lindsey as to how they aren’t going to listen to any evidence no matter what. Hell, she got Murkowski to cross swords with the Gravedigger and call out his unconstitutional behavior! Pelosi actually got a small “debate” to occur as to just how much in the tank for Trump the Repub majority could declare themselves to be, given the impeachment oath they have to take. Frankly, this was incredible for the shithole nation the Gravedigger is creating.
Impeachment was always going to be a risky strategy of attempting to force our failed nation to confront what it (and its failed constitution) hath wrought: the “election” of an amoral, mentally deranged, sadistic conman lawbreaker as Prez. It’s unlikely the conman can be removed from office, given the degenerate state of the monstrous Repub party and horrendous “conservative” movement—which is never going to abandon Donald Trump. But a senate trial (with the Repub’s own Chief Justice having to maintain the fiction that he is an impartial judge) is the best chance of presenting the reality of our political criminal and his lawless regime to the hapless “independents” that regretfully are in charge of “deciding” our elections–the dead hand of the 18th Century electoral college notwithstanding.
The Gravedigger has now been forced to acknowledge that opening arguments “may” result in the need to call witnesses. CJ Roberts will be in charge of all requests for subpoenas and thus can hear motions for witnesses and documents–as well as arguments that both McConnell and Lindsey are ineligible to be competent jurors based on their total subordination of their judgement in favor of the impeached executive and their desire to coordinate the trial procedure with the defense. And if the Gravedigger calls for a (Repub) vote to overrule some ruling of the Repub CJ, he may find that he does not have all his National Trumpalist stooges (like Murkowski) on board–and in any event if the presiding CJ is so overruled, this is exactly what the failed citizenry needs to see as they contemplate both today’s Repub party and the failed state that is TrumpAmerica.
And perhaps the “Seig Heil!!”s will ring a little less enthusiastically…
We’re supposed to draw reassuring (or at least interesting) conclusions from a click-bait MSN poll? Really? As one of the other commenters pointed out, the variance is down in the noise, there’s no clear trend here. Show polling trends broken down by state highlighting Republican Senators up for election in 2020 taken since the impleachment hearing started and you can start to make a case that Trump is in danger of losing votes in the Senate. But don’t just look at polls of their voters, look at polls of their funders, because that’s what drives the ultimate decisions they will make.
I’ve read elsewhere that “the Democrats are sailing toward their doom” because none of the candidates can come up with a program that bridges the gap between the centrist and the progressive wings of the party. From what I read there (and in a couple of other recent posts that I’m not going to look up) the election is already lost. So we might as well give up.
Am I to infer from this post that the only hope of getting rid of Trump is that 20 Republican Senators flip their votes?
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