UPDATED: Support For Impeachment Flips, Especially Marked Among Independents

Those are the findings of the latest Emerson Poll. Emerson College Polling shows up fairly well in the FiveThirtyEight analysis, so FWIW. Anyway, the findings are somewhat notable and tend to support the Marquette Law School polling in Wisconsin which showed support for Trump surging. The Emerson poll was national, conducted November 17-20. Here are the main findings for our purposes (read it all here):

A new Emerson poll finds  

• President Trump’s approval has increased in the last month with 48% approval and 47% disapproval, a bounce from 43% approval in the last Emerson National poll in October. 
• Support for impeachment has flipped since October from 48% support with 44% opposing to now 45% opposed and 43% in support. 
• The biggest swing is among Independents, who oppose impeachment now 49% to 34%, which is a reversal from October where they supported impeachment 48% to 39%. 

The impeachment hearings are being watched or followed by 69% of voters.  

• A plurality (26%) is getting their information from Fox News, 
• 24% are getting their information from 1 of the 3 network stations (ABC, NBC, CBS), 
• 16% are watching CNN, 
• 15% MSNBC and 
• 19% are going somewhere else for their information.

After months of attempts to gin up impeachment fever, could there reasonably be any worse results for Dems, given the usual divide in the country? We know each major party gets about 40% support, so to see a complete flip to rejection among Independents is pretty stunning.

Also interesting to see such a large percentage, 19%, "going somewhere else for their information."

UPDATE: Michael Barone has a nice piece at AEI--The Democrats’ impeachment pseudo-event--that fits right in with these polling results--Barone himself is rather an expert on polling, so he understands what's up. He also starts it out by explaining--via Daniel Boorstin--what Impeachment "Theater" is:

"The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events" is the title of a 1960s book by historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin. Pseudo-events, he wrote, are staged solely to generate news media coverage. Real events, in contrast, involve independent actors and have unpredictable outcomes. 

It’s not difficult to say which category the House Democrats’ impeachment hearings belongs in. It’s a classic pseudo-event stage-managed to prod sympathetic media into running predictable stories. Inconvenient questions from Republican members are blocked. Even the name of the original “whistleblower” is concealed, though no law requires that, and the stage managers know who he is. ... 

... Real events have uncertain and possibly momentous outcomes. 

Not so for the impeachment hearings. Witnesses are heard complaining that Trump subverted the “formal interagency policy process” and that he pressured — “bribed” is the focus-group-determined but inapt verb that Democrats are now using — Ukraine’s government for political gain. But Ukraine is not a formal U.S. ally, and Obama refused to provide it even defensive weapons when Russia seized its territory in Donbass and Crimea. Now we’re told that Trump should be ousted from office for a two-month delay in delivering those weapons. 

“The executive power,” Article II of the Constitution states, “shall be vested in a president of the United States of America.” That president, as the career diplomats testifying have acknowledged, has no obligation to follow “interagency” processes or consensus. It’s hard to avoid concluding that Democrats who detest Trump seized on this weak pretext for impeachment when and because the charges of Russian collusion they brandished for three years turned out to be baseless. 

Polls show support for impeachment declining. Americans, it turns out, don’t have to read Boorstin to recognize a pseudo-event when they see one.