Views of impeachment haven’t changed significantly since before the public hearings began

For a week or two in September, it seemed possible that a similar pattern might unfold in the impeachment inquiry targeting President Trump. When House Democrats announced the inquiry, support for the inquiry and the impeachment surged. Since then? Views of impeachment have been largely static.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll released Tuesday shows how views have changed since late October. Or, rather, how they haven’t. Support for impeaching and removing Trump sits at 49 percent — precisely where it was then. That came about a month after the impeachment inquiry began but before the public hearings held by the House Intelligence Committee got underway. Our polling spanned the House Judiciary Committee vote that finalized the articles of impeachment, which will be voted on Wednesday.

Other pollsters’ trends look similar: an uptick shortly after the inquiry began but support for impeachment and removal at between 45 and 50 percent since.

That’s reflected in FiveThirtyEight’s running trendline of support for impeachment and removal, as well. Since Oct. 8, overall support has varied within a 3-percentage-point window.

This is good news for Trump. Democrats hoped to see a Nixon-like surge in support for impeachment that would force Republicans to strongly consider impeaching Trump. That didn’t happen. Predictably, mind you: The variability in Nixon’s approval rating over his term suggested fluidity in views of his presidency that simply doesn’t exist in the Trump era. Views of Trump are polarized, a tug-of-war in which the two poles are pulling as hard as they can with the result that the middle doesn’t move. The same appears to be happening with impeachment.

Yet Trump being Trump, the president couldn’t help but argue that the good news wasn’t a failure of the Democrats to gain ground but, instead, a plunge in support for impeachment that doesn’t exist.

There have been polls in which support for impeachment has slipped. A poll from CNN-SSRS showed a 5-point drop in support for impeaching and removing Trump since late November, for example. But others, such as The Post’s, haven’t reflected that. Trump is a big fan of cherry-picking poll results that show what he wants to see and, at times, is a fan of simply plucking numbers out of the ether.

Last week, he also noted a drop in support among independents, something that has a bit more basis in reality. After the public hearings began in mid-November, support for impeachment among independents slipped, later recovering. In The Post’s new poll, that support is where it was at the end of October. In our poll, support among Democrats is up since our last poll, and support among Republicans down, but the shifts are not statistically significant.

What is significant is how long the polling has been consistent. The FiveThirtyEight trend among Democrats peaked in mid-October. Among independents, it peaked a bit later, and among Republicans, slightly earlier. Since those dates, though, the changes have been subtle: Dips among independents (down 3 points) and Republicans (down 5 points) and about the same level of support among Democrats. Again, though, those changes are minimal.

The natural question is why. Why is the response to the Trump impeachment different from that of Nixon? What is different now?

First, partisanship. The United States is more politically polarized now than it was in 1974, and, as noted above, views of Trump are more polarized than views of Nixon were.

Second, there’s a robust media infrastructure that serves as a bulwark for the president. Trump is a creature of the conservative media ecosystem, rising in Republican politics on the back of his being willing to amplify conservative media rhetoric that established Republicans wouldn’t touch.

Former White House counsel John Dean, who famously flipped on Nixon to testify against him, told Rolling Stone in 2018 that the existence of a similar universe for Nixon might have saved his presidency.

“Nixon might have survived if he had Fox News and the conservative media that exists today,” Dean said.

Third, Democrats have been deliberately constrained in their targeting, focusing exclusively on Trump’s interactions with Ukraine instead of looping in other points that have been seen as problematic for the president. The Nixon hearings spanned multiple years; the Trump inquiry began less than three months ago.

There is no doubt other factors at play. The effect, though, is a graph that’s remarkable in what it conveys.

Tens of hours of hearings, explicit testimony that witnesses saw Trump’s actions as problematic and that a quid pro quo was in play to pressure Ukraine to launch investigations that would benefit Trump politically — and a flat, unchanging line depicting how Americans’ views of the situation have remained steady.