Donald Trump seems to realize that the Jeffrey Epstein scandal has become a significant political problem for him, but much of the evidence about the scope of the problem has been anecdotal. There’s no shortage of quotes from prominent political voices, but there’s a difference between public criticism and quantitative data.
Complicating matters for the president, however, is that the quantitative data also looks bad for him and his team. The Washington Post reported:
A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday shows voters largely disapprove of the Trump administration’s handling of the investigation into deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. … According to the poll, 63 percent of voters disapprove of the Trump administration’s handling of the files, while 17 percent of voters say they approve and 20 percent did not offer an opinion.
As is nearly always the case, there were significant partisan gaps in the results, but to the chagrin of the White House, even many Republicans are not on board with what they’ve seen thus far: In the Quinnipiac poll, 40% of self-identified GOP voters said they approve of the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files, while 36% disapproved.
“Epstein has been dead and gone for years but his tawdry legacy looms large in a country wanting to know more about who he knew and whether secrets have been buried with him,” Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy said in an analysis of the data.
The results do not appear to be an outlier. The latest CNN poll conducted by SSRS, also released this week, asked respondents, “Generally speaking, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the amount of information the federal government has released about the Jeffrey Epstein case, or does it not matter to you either way?”
The results showed that 50% of the country said it was dissatisfied, while just 3% — that’s not a typo — said it was satisfied. What’s more, among Republican voters, the satisfaction rate was 4%. “My goodness gracious! When you only have 4% [of Republican voters] that is with Donald Trump on a particular issue, that is ridiculously low,” CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten said of the results. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.” That came on the heels of a YouGov-Economist poll that found two-thirds of Americans (67%) believe Trump administration officials are “covering up evidence it has about Epstein.” Even a majority of Republican voters (59%) agreed that there’s a cover-up underway. (Click on the above links for more information about the surveys’ respective methodologies and margins of error.) How will Trump and his team turn these numbers around? I haven’t the foggiest idea — but more importantly, I don’t think they know, either.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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