On Lawfare, Mieke Eoyang, Ben Freeman, and Benjamin Wittes performed some polling and have a warning for Robert Mueller:
The first question, regarding Mueller, ran from October 25 to October 27, which was coincidentally the day that Mueller obtained the indictments from a grand jury but which preceded any announcement of charges. The results show that the public has low confidence in Mueller. In fact, 32 percent report having “no confidence” in Mueller on a scale ranging from 1 (“no confidence”) to 5 (“high confidence”). No confidence was by far, the modal response. When combined with respondents selecting 2 on this scale, more than 45 percent have low confidence in Mueller, compared to just 30 percent that have above average confidence in him (those selecting 4 and 5 on this scale). While other polls have found that Americans are sharply divided along partisan lines about the investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 election, we find this same general pattern of low confidence in Mueller holds across all age, gender, and regional sub-groups. Google Survey’s inferred demographics do not let us screen for party preference, registered voters, or likely voters.
Given that Mueller is a Republican, I suppose the Democrats don’t trust him, and the GOP tribal members regard him as a traitor to the Party. Don’t despair, though:
At the very moment we published this post, the Washington Post released its own poll on confidence in Mueller, one with a strikingly different finding:
More than twice as many Americans approve as disapprove of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of possible coordination between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Russian government, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds, indicating that the conservative effort to discredit the probe has fallen flat as the case has progressed toward its first public charges.
A 58 percent majority say they approve of Mueller’s handling of the investigation while 28 percent say they disapprove, the Post-ABC poll finds. People’s views depend in large part on their political leanings, but overall, Americans are generally inclined to trust Mueller and the case he has made so far.
Meanwhile, fewer than 4 in 10 Americans say they believe Trump is cooperating with Mueller’s investigation, while about half believe he is not.
The poll was taken a few days after ours, between October 30 and November 1, and thus may well reflect respondents’ reaction to the indictment and plea this week. In other words, the two surveys may be less inconsistent they are evocative of volatility in public opinion about the investigation.
Time will tell. I thought this was interesting as well:
While concern about foreign influence may be lower than many in D.C. would expect, the public is unabashedly opposed to foreign influence in U.S. elections and the spreading of fake news, even if it is designed to help a candidate respondents support.
A majority of respondents (51 percent) “strongly disagree” with the statement “I believe that spreading inaccurate news is an acceptable tactic in a U.S. election if it helps a candidate I support.” And, a plurality (42 percent) “strongly disagree” with foreign interference if it helps a candidate they support. If respondents that just “disagree” with these statements are included, then more than seven in ten respondents oppose both foreign influence generally and the spreading of fake news specifically even if it would help their preferred candidate.
Source: Lawfare
I’m fairly appalled that the barest majority strongly sees fake news as an illegitimate political tactic; I take the simple “Disagree” category respondents to be fairly wishy washy on the topic, no matter how tempting it is to add them to the strongly oppose group and come up with a 75% or so opposition. Unfortunately, the poll respondents were not classified as to political leanings or to age group, so I can only speculate that the finding reflects the feelings of those who feel threatened by today’s controversial and new topics – that is, the older white male, who sees their dominant cultural position threatened.
Still, I’d hope the adherence to the best principles of our Republic – not to mention various religious sects – would be stronger than this. I’d be far happier with a number in the 80s or 90s; a reading of 51% suggests a culture of lip-service to principle which will eventually destroy the nation if it’s not corrected.
So this is not an encouraging poll for the future of the nation.
