Whit Ayres, June 7

Whit Ayres’ comments in The Washington Post about the potential impeachment hearing of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas:

GOP pollster Whit Ayres, who has long urged his party to moderate on immigration, says it remains unclear whether Republicans can produce evidence of impeachable offenses. If not, Ayres suggests, impeachment will backfire.

“If they’ve got no hard evidence,” Ayres told me, “it will just drive an image of the Republican Party that is very much at odds with the kind of party that can win elections in swing states or win a majority of the electorate in a presidential campaign.”

To read the full article, please click here.

Whit Ayres, November 18

Whit Ayres comments in the Associated Press (as printed in The Washington Post) regarding the House GOP’s legislative priorities:

Whit Ayres, a GOP political consultant, said Republicans should focus on inflation, crime and border security in the majority, but fears they will overreach once again.

“If past is prologue, the small House majority will govern from the right and we’ll get engaged in these investigations and cut off Ukraine aid and try to ban abortion and do all these other things that will repel a majority of the country and put Democrats back in charge,” Ayres said during a post-election forum at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

To read the full article, please click here.

Whit Ayres, February 10

Whit Ayres appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered to discuss polling and President Trump’s impeachment trial:

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966498568/how-the-polls-have-differed-between-trumps-1st-and-2nd-impeachment-trials

Dan Judy, January 12

Dan Judy’s comments to Talking Points Memo regarding calls for unity after the attack on the Capitol:

Dan Judy, Vice President of North Star Opinion Research, a consultancy for Republican candidates, told TPM that the “unity” pushers can be put in two categories. The first, Republicans who opposed Trump’s rhetoric on election fraud and voted to uphold the Electoral College certification, have at least a “credible and morally consistent argument” when they say that an impeachment would further rip apart the country, he said. 

Not so for the other Republicans, those that fed into and amplified Trump’s conspiracy theories, he added. 

“Calls for unity from them with no acknowledgement of the President’s part in this simply have no credibility beyond the hardest-core Trump base,” he said.

To read the full article, please click here.

Whit Ayres, December 3

Whit Ayres’ comments to CNN regarding impeachment and views of President Trump:

“The whole impeachment debate has intensified preexisting feelings about the President,” says Republican pollster Whit Ayres. “Most people who like him do so with their eyes wide open. … They understand his strengths and his weaknesses and they prefer him to the alternatives as they see it. On the other hand, people who dislike him will be even more appalled because what they are seeing reinforces their existing views.”

Ayres, the Republican pollster, says Trump’s unbending response to impeachment underlines the pugnacious take-no-prisoners posture that thrills his core supporters. 

“Supporters take away he’s a fighter, that he’s never backs down, that he never gives in to the carping critics and that he will stand his ground no matter what the situation and hold his head high in the face of unrelenting criticism,” he said.

To read the full article, please click here.

Whit Ayres, November 30

Whit Ayres’ comments to the Associated Press regarding impeachment:

“It will be part of the mosaic, but hardly the overriding issue,” GOP pollster Whit Ayres predicted about impeachment’s impact next November. “It will have faded by then and it will also have simply reinforced the preexisting attitudes and made them more intense.”

To read the full article, please click here.

Whit Ayres’ WSJ Opinion Piece, November 18

From Whit Ayres’ op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on November 18:

As the nation tumbles toward the 2020 presidential elections, it seems also on course for its second presidential impeachment in a little more than two decades. It all looks like so much chaos, but our likely path forward is illuminated by polls about the Bill Clinton impeachment in the 1990s and predictions from one of America’s most prolific Founding Fathers.

While the Clinton and Trump impeachment efforts differ dramatically on the politics and allegations involved, one similarity offers tantalizing parallels that could predict how the public reacts to the current investigation. Unlike the Nixon impeachment inquiry in 1973-74, the Clinton and Trump impeachment drives evoked an overwhelmingly strong partisan reaction. In both instances, stalwart party members on either side defended behavior they would roundly condemn in a president of the other party.

To read the full column, please click here.

Jon McHenry, October 12

Jon McHenry’s comments to the Associated Press on the potential for Republicans to support impeachment:

In today’s hyperpartisan climate, if the House impeaches Trump, it seems hard to envision 20 Senate Republicans joining all Democrats for the two-thirds majority required to remove Trump from office. Some retiring Republicans might be reluctant to cast a futile vote against Trump after a lifetime of party loyalty, while others might view it as a way to burnish their reputations for independence.

“You’ve just got to decide where the evidence lies and where you want your legacy to be,” said Republican pollster Jon McHenry.

To read the full article, please click here.

Whit Ayres, October 15

Whit Ayres’ comments in The New York Times regarding public opinion on impeachment:

Still, there are signs that the outlook for Mr. Trump is not improving. Support for impeaching the president has been growing among Americans who were once against it. Before the Ukraine revelations, said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, about 15 percent of Americans who disapproved of Trump’s job performance still opposed his impeachment and removal. 

“The Ukraine revelations are reducing that number,” he said, to 12 percent in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. “The progression of this story will likely make the impeachment inquiry numbers look much like Trump’s job approval numbers, with 40 to 45 percent opposing it and 55 to 60 percent supporting it,” Mr. Ayres added.

To read the full article, please click here.