Donald Trump has become the third president ever to be impeached, but he’s not too worried about it. And according to the polling, he need not be.
Since the House deposed the most damning of witnesses in its impeachment investigation in October, Trump’s Gallup approval rating has risen by 10 points, from 39% to a personal record of 49%. And it seems that Gallup is no anomaly. In the past year, Trump’s approval average calculated by RealClearPolitics has increased from under 41% to around 45%. The last time his approval average performed this consistently well was during his first 100 days in office, a grace period artificially boosting the favorability of all presidents in recent history.
Especially in partisan circles, one could be forgiven for believing that Trump is seeing a post-impeachment bump similar to that which President Bill Clinton experienced more than two decades ago.
But that’s not all. The low turnout at last night’s disastrous Iowa Democratic caucuses illustrates that impeachment, as an important event, is really just a media creation. Voters care more about Trump’s extraordinary successes than they do about the sideshow in the Senate chamber.
Lost in the controversy over Iowa is the astounding fact that this year’s turnout was reportedly on pace with the disappointing numbers of 2016. That caucus, which kicked off more of a coronation than an actual Democratic primary process, attracted only 172,000 participants. It was a huge drop-off from the record high of nearly a quarter-million caucusgoers in the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton-John Edwards contest of 2008.
In theory, this year’s caucuses ought to have been the most competitive in the party’s history. The field is arguably more crowded with genuinely viable candidates than any Democratic field has been before. And the urgency that Democrats say they feel to defeat Trump is record-breaking. Yet, turnout for this bellwether nominating contest, which has chosen the Democratic nominee in seven of the last nine contested nomination battles, was no better than when Queen Hillary was a certainty, there were only two campaigns driving the turnout, and there was no hated Republican president to defeat.
In the Hawkeye State, a plurality of voters believe both that the House shouldn’t have impeached Trump and that the Senate ought not to remove him from office. But that leaves 2 in 5 Iowans who responded to polling that the Senate should convict and remove Trump. That they didn’t turn out in robust numbers signifies that Democrats’ antipathy toward Trump just isn’t widely shared. The real issue is that most people like their lives and their country better under Trump than they did under Obama, whom Iowans clearly did love.
The current economy features the lowest unemployment in half a century, real wage growth benefiting lower-income earners for a change, and consistent economic growth fueling the longest bull market in history. There’s no hiding it: This is the best economy in generations. More than two-thirds of those polled by Gallup report being satisfied by the state of the economy, a 22-point increase since the end of the Obama administration, and consumer confidence has peaked to its highest point in two decades.
But it’s not just “the economy, stupid!” Since the beginning of Trump’s tenure, our reported satisfaction in the nation’s security from terrorism has increased by 18 points to 68%; in military strength and preparedness by 15 points to 81%; and in the success of blacks and other racial minorities in the nation by 9 points to 46%.
Sure, the media and the Democratic Party think impeachment is important. Sure, they have fumed over Trump’s recent killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and scoffed at his criminal justice reform advertisements. But the rest of the country? They’re pretty OK with him.
That’s why Democrats didn’t turn out in especially large numbers in Iowa, and it’s why Trump is in an unusually strong position headed toward reelection.
