The MSN Poll

Ye Olde Blogge follows the impeachment opinion polling very carefully, and, by carefully, I mean checking the FiveThirtyEight impeachment tracker several times a day. According to them, as of this writing, support for impeachment stands at 47.8% support and 46.0% don’t support. They’ve switched their front page summary to a tracker by party affiliation, which is annoying since to find the aggregation, you have to click on the link. In the article, they also breakdown the polling by the type of question asked, like support for impeachment versus support for removal from office, for example, so it can be worth it to read it a few dozen times.

Rothschild makes an important point, though, in that part of the erosion of the don’t support side is people shifting to the don’t know option since people don’t go from non-supporting to supporting, they go through the don’t know option first. Obviously, which is why he doesn’t state it, I guess, the support option is growing because more don’t know people are shifting there.

Shifting Opinion on Impeachment

I noted in a large variety of posts, more information does not necessarily penetrate our-made-up-minds, so it isn’t like people are seeing the nose-deep parade of evidence flood into their living rooms and think, Gee, I’ve backed the Ol’ Pussy Grabber through Muslim bans, fine murderous racist Nazis, caging children, destroying small and mid-sized farmers with tariffs so that corporate farmers can buy them up, and quickening climate change through deregulation, but using US government congressionally mandated resources to pressure a foreign government into a personal favor that will affect our 2020 elections is just too much.

Collective Intelligence

If it isn’t more information that is changing their minds, what is? It is our collective intelligence! We base our opinions and beliefs on the opinions and beliefs of those around us. In simpler times, like those found on the savannas of Africa when our hunter-gatherer ancestors were doing all of the evolving, it served us well. Beliefs were not very consequential to our very survival. You could have ridiculous opinions about angry volcano and earth gods and it didn’t mean you’d all die from climate change. It did mean that all y’all would be a more cohesive group and work better together and achieve greater things and make it more likely that all y’all would survive. Nowadays, it means that our climate is likely to wipe us all out and make our immediate future miserable and very difficult. And, they say irony is dead!

So, obvs, as the kids like to say these days, people are standing around the proverbial water coolers opining that the obstruction of Congress by withholding documents and preventing key witnesses from testifying suggests that the Ol’ Pussy Grabber is less than innocent and that Gordon Sondland saying that there was a quid pro quo, means there was a quid pro quo and that shit is wrong.

When more people around us hold an opinion or belief, we tend to mold ours to it. When more people on the TV, okay, the interwebs, whatev — as the kids like to say — are saying that the Ol’ Pussy Grabber is wrong and guilty and we need a fair trial with witnesses and documents, then it starts to affect how people interpret information and which facts we’ll accept as facts.

Using Collective Intelligence

This means two things, bitches — as the kids like to say — when you go back to work in the New Year, keep talking up impeachment. And, when you meet friends, family, and neighbors, talk up impeachment. And, okay three things, when you post on social media — which arguably is still meeting with friends, family, and neighbors, so maybe it really is still just two things — post your support for impeachment.

What it doesn’t mean is that we don’t have to get into big heated arguments. When I run into Bernie Bros — is that still a think the kids say? — who claim that if the Dems had nominated a better candidate, the Ol’ Pussy Grabber wouldn’ta won, I reply, I guess you think that a Clinton presidency would be as bad as this administration and that you think where we are right now is okay. You can have that as an opinion, sure, but that’s what you’re saying. And, I leave it at that. It generally shuts them up.

Same thing here when some Ol’ Pussy Grabber supporter launches into their gaslighting diatribe of bullshit, I guess what you’re saying is that we no longer have to follow the Constitution and that foreign interference in our election is acceptable. And that’s okay. That can be your opinion. And, I don’t take it any further than that. Kinda like our boy, Adam Schiff’s thunderous refrain, You might think its okay; I don’t.

Photo Attribution

The photo used as the feature image was taken from Rothschild’s tweet. I don’t know where Rothschild got it from.