Clinton's approval is at 73%: "That's not only an all-time high for Clinton, it also beats the highest approval rating President Ronald Reagan ever had."
57% now have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, while only 31% have a favorable view of the Republican Party. This is the lowest approval rating of the Republicans in the last few decades.
I assume that the Republicans will have to recover, although it is an interesting question if the GOP could follow the Canadian Progressive Conservatives and the British Tories from majority governance to decimated minority?
The more interesting question is how to understand this public fall of the GOP. Is it merely the public repugnance at the sexual witchhunt or is it a more fundamental response to the reason for the witchhunt, namely the exhaustion of the neoliberal conservative project and its substitution of character politics for its lost policy consensus?
A hint are polls that show two-thirds of the public feeling that the GOP Congress is completely out of touch with the values and needs of the average person. And the fact that Democrats are doing well probably indicates less a love for them than a signal that this public revulsion has not channelled inself into an apathetic anti-politician response (a la Perot a few years ago) but into a desire for substantive policy response - a desire projected hopefully onto the Dems.
For the Left, this indicates, after years of apathy and antipathy to new initiatives, a reopening of the public appetite for policy responses. Clinton will have first crack with his State of the Union and planned Spring offensive (and it may be pretty offensive if his rumored taste for partial privatization is accurate) but there is also an opportunity for the Left to counter-move on living wage, child care, health care and attacks on corporate welfare.
It's a bizarre endproduct of this whole process, but impeachment may be the best service Clinton gave to the progressive side of the ledger in his Presidency.
--Nathan Newman