Here & Now

New Marquette Poll Shows No Change In Views on Impeachment

Frederica Freyberg:

In Wisconsin election news, an Ozaukee County Circuit Court judge this afternoon sided with conservatives and ruled to deactivate the registrations of more than 200,000 voters flagged as having moved and changed address. The court ruling comes as the State Elections Commission is fighting a lawsuit that calls for quickly removing the voters off voting lists. The commission instead wanted to give them until 2021 before removing them from the books and says it will appeal the ruling.

Now to an inside look at the results of the new Marquette Law School poll. Earlier in the program we asked Congressman Ron Kind about the poll numbers on Trump impeachment efforts. We get analysis on those results as well as the other topics covered from the director of the poll, Charles Franklin. Thanks for being here.

Charles Franklin:

Thank you. Good to be here.

Frederica Freyberg:

First before we start with your numbers, as a political scientist, what is your reaction to the impeachment vote today?

Charles Franklin:

Well, it doesn’t come along very often. It’s extraordinary. Maybe we’re not treating it as quite as extraordinary as it might be. You know, long stretch between the 1800s and Johnson and then Nixon and then Clinton and now this one. So they’re a little closer bunched together than they’ve ever been. I think it’s actually Hamilton in the Federalist Papers wrote that impeachment would always be a political process and a battle between partisans. And I think we’ve seen that really in all three of this recent period’s impeachment efforts. And the question is does it move the public at all? Does the public come away from these things with some different understanding than they had before? In the Nixon case with Watergate, I think that was true, but in the Clinton and at least so far in the Trump case, doesn’t seem that opinions have moved much.

Frederica Freyberg:

Well, in fact then, let’s take a look at our first screen of your polling results that shows that the numbers have not moved much, but considering the Democrats’ efforts, this seems interesting.

Charles Franklin:

It is interesting in a couple of ways. So 40% pro impeachment, 52 opposed. It was 40/53 a month ago. That’s how little it has moved. And that is over the course of two weeks of public testimony that spoke directly to issues and claims about what the president had done and simply didn’t move people’s opinions. What’s more, people’s beliefs in whether President Trump asked Ukraine to do an investigation or whether he withheld military aid to pressure them to do that investigation, neither of those numbers moved very much. And so the testimony didn’t persuade people. They stayed where they had started.

Frederica Freyberg:

What does that tell you?

Charles Franklin:

Well, it says we’re locked into our pre-existing opinions. President Trump is a deeply polarizing figure and people see him that way and they’re for him or against him. But if this was new information from the testimony, and I think it broadly was, it didn’t provide people with a reason to change their minds.

Frederica Freyberg:

As to the horse race numbers, and we have some in our next slide, it looks like a statistical tie between Donald Trump and Biden, Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg and Booker.

Charles Franklin:

This is very much what a toss-up race looks like. Biden leads by one. Trump leads the others but just be two over Sanders and by one on each of the other candidates. Most important thing to notice here is not only is there not much variation in Trump’s numbers, there’s not much variation across these Democrats either and that’s reflecting the power of partisan divisions over Trump and for the Democrats that — we included Cory Booker in part because he’s not a front-runner in the primaries, but you see he does just as well as the front-runners do. That shows partisan attachment and antipathy to Trump among Democrats.

Frederica Freyberg:

But among Democrats in Wisconsin? Because he doesn’t even qualify for next week’s PBS debate, polling at something like 2% nationally. What is up with Cory Booker in Wisconsin?

Charles Franklin:

Well, again I think probably we could ask other candidates and see a similar kind of effect. I think, we– last month had asked Klobuchar and Booker but we asked them only on half the sample. Klobuchar didn’t do very well but Booker did quite well. So we kept him on this time to see with a full sample would we get a similar result. And we do. Now it may be the Klobuchar would also do well but we haven’t tested her full sample so we’ll hold her in abeyance for a little bit about where she might go.

Frederica Freyberg:

The other thing that struck me on that kind of match-up polling was that Joe Biden has taken a pretty significant slide since your last poll in October.

Charles Franklin:

It has tightened a bit. Biden had been up by six and then was down by three last month and now up by one. So there’s some wobble in there. He was up a little more in August, as a matter of fact. So there is a little bit of a tightening on Biden. The others, though, are mostly have been tight and stay tight. And what we’re seeing in this kind of a toss-up race is last month it was Trump a bit ahead, mostly inside the margin of error. The month before that it was the Democrats slightly ahead, mostly inside the margin of error. This time we’re right in the middle of those. We’re almost dead even across the board.

Frederica Freyberg:

Speaking of right in the middle, one group we haven’t talked about are independents. Obviously important in these kinds of match-ups.

Charles Franklin:

Independents are only about 10% of Wisconsin voters, but when you have a race this close, they’re really important. On balance, they’re opposed to impeachment, not enormously, but on balance they’re opposed. And on balance, they disapprove of President Trump. So you can see that they are potentially a swing group here. Not thrilled with the impeachment effort, but also potentially getable by Democrats given that they’re not that approving of the president.

Frederica Freyberg:

Let me get to one last slide and that is approval numbers for Governor Tony Evers. 50% approval, 38% disapproval. Both numbers have grown. How should his supporters feel about these kinds of numbers?

Charles Franklin:

Well, this is a pretty good performance. I think most importantly he had been over 50 with net approval in the high teens, low 20s. Last month that fell to a net plus five. Five points more approved than disapproved. So it was an opening question of whether he was beginning to slip. This bit of a rebound this time suggests that whatever last month was didn’t give us an indication that he’s on his way down and this bit of a rebound puts him not quite as well as he was in October, but still up from where he was last time. This big of a net approval, plus 12, is better than Walker had during most of his term, which simply reflects how strong the balance was in Governor Walker’s case.

Frederica Freyberg:

For sure. Charles Franklin, thanks very much.

Charles Franklin:

Thank you.