Not too long ago, the press was calling President Trump a goner.

Remember this early October Fox News poll that shocked so many people? They had it that a majority of randomly selected registered voters, 50% to 41%, were all in for impeaching and removing President Trump. We had our doubts, but the press reported that as perfectly representative of public opinion, undoubtedly a lit fuse to the eventual ouster of President Trump.

Here's what Peggy Noonan was saying after that one:

Impeachment of course will happen.

...and...

Polling on impeachment has been fairly consistent, with Gallup reporting Thursday 52% supporting the president's impeachment and removal. Serious and dramatic hearings would move the needle on public opinion, tripping it into seriously negative territory for the president. And if the needle moves, the Senate will move in the same direction.

This, as it turns out, is exactly what didn't happen.

Here's the latest poll, from the non-partisan Quinnipiac University, reported by the Daily Caller:

A Quinnipiac University national poll released Tuesday shows a majority of voters oppose impeaching and removing President Donald Trump from office. The poll shows registered voters oppose removing the president from office by a 51-45 margin. Independents opposed impeaching and removing Trump by a 52-44 margin, Quinnipiac's poll found.

So now we've got the impeachment needle moving decisively to the other side. Not only did the needle not move the way Noonan forecast it might move, but it moved in exactly the opposite direction.

What happened? Three things stand out.

One, the Democrats didn't have much of a case, so they put their thumbs on the scale. They hid the whistleblower, for one, despite evidence that he was no lonely voice crying out in the wilderness, but a guy who carefully coordinated with a lot of Democrats before filing. Trump released his full transcripts, yet under Democrat rigging, he had zero right to confront his accuser. Then they held secret basement hearings, which were actually auditions to cherry-pick the witnesses they liked for the big public show to come later, as well as to cherry-pick the testimonies they liked to leak to the press. The only things kept secret were the testimonies of those who exculpated Trump. They also kicked Republicans out of the basement hearings and prevented them from issuing subpoenas and calling their own witnesses. They refused to allow Trump's lawyer anywhere near their Schiff show. The rigging on every front went bone-deep.

Two, unable to get any sort of solid or firsthand case against Trump except through the lone testimony of rabid Deep State partisans such as the petty self-important Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, they shifted their arguments. First, it was national security endangered. Then it was "quid pro quo" as if political horse trading were unheard of until Trump came along. Then it became "bribery," despite the fact that the only cash that changed hands was the U.S. cash that went to Ukraine — and Ukrainian cash that went into Hunter Biden's pocket. Somehow, Trump's the one who took the bribe. When the narrative shifts that often, and the public cannot state in simple sentences what the "high crime" to justify removal from the presidency is, any impeachment case is going to collapse like a bad soufflé.

Three, they blew their public hearings. CNN reported in mid-November that they were getting nervous, and Breitbart reported that black and Hispanic support for impeachment was collapsing. Nancy Pelosi was nervous. Politico reported in late November that the House Judiciary hearings were going to be their big turnaround, their do-or-die moment, their "one final shot to drive up public support for impeachment..."

How'd those work out? Seems they had about a day of those, with three screaming leftist professors, one of them cheap-shotting a 12-year-old's name for laughs. Rep. Al Green, putting his two cents in, said he was unhappy there were no black faces among them.

Noonan's analysis, if you reread that piece, turns out to have been prophetic. Democrats, being leftists, went and did everything she told them not to do. They were manifestly unfair. They bored the heck out of the public by not having anything to say, constantly shifting their narratives.

Is foreign-aid horse-trading to a non-NATO ally, a famously corrupt country the Obama administration denied military aid to entirely earlier, really the big fat national security threat to the U.S. that a slightly-too-cozy-with-Ukraine lite colonel like Vindman says it is?

Is democracy itself at stake, with pious invocations to the Founding Fathers appropriate? On a crappy little matter like guns, something Democrats don't even like, to faraway Ukraine? House speaker Nancy Pelosi's pious intonations and tears and flapdoodle in that white pantsuit with weird makeup speaking of the future of the republic and "prayerful" consideration and all that "love for country" probably drove a lot of voters right then and there into the anti-impeachment camp.

Don't think so. Life goes on in the U.S. whether we give aid to Ukraine or not. The case for a border wall probably is such a national security case, but aid to Ukraine is an absolute joke. Russia already took what it wanted, and plenty of people in eastern Ukraine were actually happy about it. It built a bridge to Crimea, so it's going on the 'possession is property' model. There are very sharply colliding forces between Russia's perceived strategic interests and wounded pride of empire, versus Ukraine's desire to be a western country, that the U.S. can do little to fix, and why should we be enforcing some status quo on Nikita Khrushchev's very badly drawn country lines anyway when Europe isn't going to bother? Any U.S. money handed to poor corrupt Ukraine is likely to get all stolen anyway.

Bottom line: The impeachment case is pure garbage and the more information that rolls out about it, the less the public likes it. No wonder the polls have flipped. If Democrats can't respect the results of a three-year-old election, can't play fair, can't keep their scandal straight, and can't hold a credible public hearing without sending in the clowns, who needs this? No wonder the public wants the entire impeachment case to be thrown the heck out.

And thank goodness they vote.

Image credit: Photo illustration by Monica Showalter from public domain sources.