


Buoyed by the August lull in hyped-up media coverage tying him to deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, President Donald Trump’s voter approval “bounced back” and took Democratic speculation of a third impeachment off the table.
In an expansive survey, John Zogby Strategies said that the end of coverage of the scandal, while Congress took a monthlong recess, helped raise the president’s approval to 46% and dampened the public’s fascination with the story and demands for more transparency in the Epstein case.
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“He’s had a bounce,” said Jeremy Zogby, managing partner of John Zogby Strategies. “He’s bounced back,” he said in a podcast about the new survey results.
Like several other pollsters, John Zogby Strategies had been tracking a decrease in the president’s polling through the summer. “This is what tends to happen, at least as far back as I can remember: you get past the first 100 days and then the support starts falling off,” he said.
But Trump’s numbers turned up in August in part because Democrats failed to seize on the president’s polling swoon and didn’t use the month to offer voters a winning agenda. He “weathered the story,” he concluded.
John Zogby, his father and founder of the polling outfit, said that Trump’s polling revival likely ended Democratic talk about impeaching the president. “At 46%, that is not an impeachable president,” he said.
Their survey of 1,000 likely voters also found Democrats in such a deep hole with voters that winning back control of the House or Senate in next year’s midterm elections looks tough.
“What needs to be noted is that the Democrats are not doing well,” said the Democratic pollster. John Zogby said that of the five issues most important to voters, Democrats beat out Republicans on just one: handling healthcare.
Voters, he added, are also dismayed with the party’s direction as it shifts to urban socialism in cities such as New York and Minneapolis.
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In their survey, for example, Zogby Strategies asked Democrats who have left the party why they did so. “And a lot of them — it was a tie — said either the party was too woke or its only agenda was going after Donald Trump. That is not an agenda for victory,” said John Zogby.
He said that the party could be headed into a political purgatory as it was in the 1970s after picking liberal Sen. George McGovern as its 1972 presidential nominee. In that election, President Richard Nixon won 60% of the popular vote, 49 states, and was the first Republican to sweep the South.