Compared with polls showing Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign flagging (and Bernie Sanders outright beating her, beyond the margin of error, in New Hampshire), the news that a majority of American voters support a criminal investigation of Clinton’s email is grim for her.
The poll, conducted by Monmouth University, found that “52% of registered voters, including 82% of Republicans, 54% of independents and 23% of Democrats” thought a criminal investigation was warranted.
“Registered voters” is a pretty tight screen for a poll like this. It should be noted that the poll was actually conducted July 21 through August 2, so it doesn’t even account for the incredibly damaging recent revelations about classified and top-secret material moving through Clinton’s server, which is – let’s be frank here – indisputably a federal crime. It’s likely that most poll respondents are not well-versed in the relevant laws, but think it’s simple common sense that such a serious matter should be thoroughly investigated.
Monmouth’s poll further determined that 51 percent of the respondents thought Clinton set up her email system as a “matter of convenience,” while 38 percent thought she “has something to hide.” That’s good news for Clinton, because it means a remarkable number of people are willing to at least pretend they believe her patently ridiculous and demonstrably false claims about not wanting to carry two cell phones around. But it’s very bad news too, because it means a large number of respondents who accept her “convenience” excuse nevertheless support a criminal investigations.
There was an unsurprisingly sharp partisan break on the question of Clinton’s motives, as 80 percent of Democrats believed the “convenience” excuse, while 68 percent of Republicans thought Clinton has something to hide. Independents were split 48-41 percent between convenience and evasiveness.
The poll found Republican voters were vastly better informed on the Clinton mail story, with 78 percent of them saying they were paying close attention and receiving ample coverage of the story, while only 56 percent of Democrats and independents said so.
The new top-secret revelations, FBI seizure of Clinton’s server, and collapse of her talking points will make this a very difficult story for loyal Democrat voters to ignore moving forward… especially when liberals tuning into their in-house network MSNBC are treated to performances like Howard Dean’s crash-and-burn on “Morning Joe” Wednesday. Democrat blowhards don’t get laughed off the MSNBC stage every day.
Imagine if Dean had been appearing on a network that would call him on his blatant lies about House Benghazi Committee chair Trey Gowdy trying to grab Clinton’s server before the FBI could get it, or shred his foolish point about how the emails weren’t marked as “classified” by pointing out that the server Clinton irresponsibly created didn’t mark them as such by design.
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