Pollster Emily Ekins said on Monday that Democrats are concerned that if they are too aggressive in impeaching President Trump ahead of the 2020 election, they run the risk of making him sympathetic.
“I think a lot of these Democrats realize that if they go too far on the offensive, they’re going to make Trump appear like a victim,” Ekins, polling director at the Cato Institute, told Hill.TV’s Jamal Simmons on “What America’s Thinking.”
“Going into 2020, that’s actually not going to go well for the Democrats,” she continued. “So I think some of them want to back off for this reason.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-N.Y.) made news last week when she told The Washington Post that impeaching Trump was “not worth it” for Democrats.
“Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country,” she said. “And he’s just not worth it.”
Multiple progressive lawmakers, including freshman Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), have called for moving forward with impeaching Trump.
Trump last year warned voters ahead of the 2018 midterms that Democrats would move to impeach him if they didn’t elect more Republican representation in Congress.
“We have to keep the House because if we listen to Maxine Waters, she’s going around saying ‘We will impeach him,’ ” Trump said at a Michigan rally last year, referring to the California Democrat.
— Julia Manchester
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