So I guess that Comey for President 2020 campaign is probably gonna be put on hold, huh?

I’m not sure when we started polling things like this but a Harvard-Harris survey was commissioned to determine the popularity of FBI Director James Comey. The results are in and, well, let’s just say that he isn’t going to be winning the Miss Congeniality award. (The Hill)

FBI Director James Comey is unpopular across the political spectrum, according to a new poll that finds voters have a negative opinion of Comey by a more than two-to-one margin.

According to data from a Harvard-Harris Poll survey of registered voters provided exclusively to The Hill, only 17 percent have a favorable view of Comey, compared to 35 percent who have a negative view of him.

Forty-one percent of Democrats have an unfavorable view of Comey, with only 12 percent saying they view him positively.

Comey is almost at break-even among Republicans, with 26 percent viewing him positively and 27 percent viewing him negatively.

The fact that people are pretty ticked off at James Comey shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. This is a process which started unfolding last summer and only got worse as the 2016 campaign progressed. Anyone who liked Hillary Clinton was unhappy that the FBI was investigating her in the first place. Then, when Comey came out and announced that the investigation was closing and no charges would be filed, Clinton’s critics were up in arms. When he called yet another press conference announcing that the investigation was being reopened weeks before the election, the cycle repeated itself.

But that’s not the end of the bad news. Digging further into the numbers, the one base of “support” that Comey appears to retain is among Republicans, who are evenly split in their view of him. But the big catch here is that the survey was done entirely before his most recent appearance this week when he pretty much enraged anyone who is a supporter of President Trump. I get the feeling that if they run those numbers again, Comey may be just about as popular as… Congress. (And that’s not saying much when you consider that the popularity of the legislative branch is only slightly higher than that of most sexually-transmitted diseases.)

If there’s any good news in all this for James Comey it’s that he really doesn’t have to worry about it. He’s not actually a politician (his being an appointed position) and he doesn’t have to stand for election. In fact, aside from judges on the Supreme Court, the heads of our law enforcement agencies are just about the last people we would want getting wrapped up in partisan politics and influenced by the shifting tides of public opinion. The only vote of confidence which matters comes from Comey’s bosses and even that probably doesn’t impact him all that much. It would be a dicey proposition to remove the Director of the FBI over what could easily be perceived as partisan infighting absent some proof of negligence or incompetence in his job.

But what the heck? We’ve still got a long way to go before the midterms so I suppose we might as well poll something.