Why Impeachment Makes for Bad Thanksgiving Dinner Conversation – By Philip Elliott (TIME) / Nov 25 2019
If you want to avoid indigestion this week, skimp on politics—and possibly the gravy—this Thanksgiving.
Unless everyone at the table is wearing bright-red Make America Great Again hats or #imstillwithher pins, it’s best to avoid the political headlines altogether. Recent polls indicate there are very few people in your circle whose opinions will be bendable on the issue that has consumed Washington, D.C., this fall: the looming impeachment of President Donald Trump in the House and his unlikely removal from office by the Senate. Only 6% of respondents last month told Quinnipiac University’s poll that they were unsure whether or not Trump should be impeached and removed from office. And with nearly a year to go before elections, just 17% of Americans say they are undecided about whether they are voting for or against Trump, according to another NBC News-Wall Street Journal survey.
Avoiding politics has always been a good rule of polite dinner conversation, but acrimony this season rivals the friction felt in November of 2016, when many Americans saw family members for the first time after Trump won his election. The long, heated arguments over that year’s turkey still send a chill down many a host’s spine. And today, like three years ago, the partisan and generational divides on impeachment run consistent and deep. According to the Quinnipiac University poll, 55% of respondents support the House impeachment inquiry, with 93% of Democrats backing it and 88% of Republicans opposing it.
Trump’s strongest critics in recent polls are under the age of 40, according to Washington Post-ABC News polling. Many in that group stayed home in 2016, unimpressed with Hillary Clinton but are now organized and ready to flex their muscles. Millennials are the largest potential voting bloc in the country, with 72% of voters ages 18-29 disapprove of how Trump is handling his job, compared to 55% of voters ages 30-39. That may explain why, according to an earlier Pew Research Center survey, about a quarter of young Republicans left the GOP between December 2015 and March of 2017.
But all isn’t lost for the older MAGA crowd. Trump’s support among core Republican voters is expected to be his defense to block Republican Senators from defecting to vote to remove him from office, making his removal from office unlikely. And thanks to the buckets of cash that Trump and the Republican National Committee are raising, Trump supporters feel more emboldened to share their views or the President in mixed company. A May Pew survey found 57% of those who approve of Trump would voice that support at a divided dinner table, while just 43% of Trump critics would do the same.
Continue to article: https://time.com/5739113/trump-impeachment-thanksgiving/
