The nation is now split cleanly in half over impeachment:
As you can see, support has been on the upswing since the end of the Mueller investigation, so it would be easy to assume that the Mueller report deserves the credit for the improving numbers. And it does! But not in the way you would think.
Democratic support for impeachment has always been high (take note, Joe Biden). There’s been improvement there since the release of the report, but there wasn’t a lot of ground to gain. Republicans, of course, are dead set against it. So the real reason for that shift is independents.
And when did independents break toward impeachment? When Republican Rep. Justin Amash broke with his party and called for impeachment.
Take a look at this close-up of the impeachment question among independents.
The day Amash called for impeachment, independents opposed impeachment by a 52-39 margin. About two weeks later, the numbers had swung a net -10 points to just 47-44.
(That last dot in the screenshot above is Mueller’s press conference, which didn’t move the numbers any further, and maybe even blunted further movement. It’s a user interface quirk that we’re fixing. Things get funky when we add too many news events packed tightly together.)
Inevitably, someone will say, “Correlation doesn’t equal causation!” and that is certainly true. But if you say that, take a look at the news around that time and come up with an alternate theory for that dramatic rise in support for impeachment among independents (and only independents!).
Amash’s surprising (and so far unique) stance for a federally elected Republican has earned him a great deal of praise and scorn, depending on where you stand on the criminal Trump enterprise. But it seems pretty clear that it had an outsized impact on how the public views impeachment.