New Polls Show Democrats' Impeachment Barrage Has Voters Unmoved
Even though the House of Representatives is busy drafting articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, two new polls show that the majority of Americans are still against removing him from office.
A Quinnipiac University poll revealed that 51 percent of registered voters surveyed think Trump should not be impeached and removed from office, while 45 percent said he should be.
These results signal a change in voter opinion since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry; this is the first poll in which more than half of the voters think the president should not be impeached.
“With Washington in turmoil and House Democrats poised to vote on impeaching the president for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, American voters signal they are slightly more inclined not to impeach than to impeach,” polling analyst Tim Malloy said.
A Monmouth University poll found that while surveyed Americans felt Trump had tried to hinder the investigation, many people did not trust the inquiry as a whole.
In fact, according to the results of the survey, only 26 percent of the public responded that they trusted how the Democrats have conducted the impeachment inquiry, while 44 percent do not trust the process at all.
“Monmouth’s poll last month showed that half the public believed trust in the House impeachment process would increase once the hearings moved out into the open. That simply has not happened,” Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, said.
While 45 percent of Americans surveyed by Monmouth felt that Trump should be impeached and removed from office, 50 percent opposed impeachment.
“Opinion on impeachment has been rock steady since news of the Ukraine call first broke,” Murray said. “Any small shifts we are seeing now are likely to be statistical noise.”
Unsurprisingly, there is a partisan divide on views on the impeachment inquiry and the president’s participation in such.
Eighty-seven percent of Democrats said that Trump has not cooperated with the House Democrats while 89 percent say he has withheld information from the investigation.
Although a majority of Republicans agree that Trump withheld information, 60 percent say he has done so for a legitimate reason.
Both polls show that despite the impeachment inquiry, Trump’s job approval rating has not really changed.
In Monmouth’s polling, his approval rating has ranged from 40 percent to 44 percent in the last 12 months, with a current approval rating of 43 percent. Trump received a 41 percent approval rating in the Quinnipiac poll.
According to Murray, however, these polling results show that the impending impeachment vote is going to further divide the country.
“The Republican defense of Trump has been that the contents of the call were not out of the ordinary,” Murray said. “And while few Americans buy that premise, there is not a clear majority on the other side who say that Trump acted wholly out of political motives.
“This suggests that the upcoming vote on the articles of impeachment will continue to divide the public.”
The House of Representatives is expected to vote on articles of impeachment in the coming days, and a Senate trial will most likely be held in January after the holiday break.
For its most recent poll, Quinnipiac surveyed 1,553 self-identified registered voters with a margin of error of +/- 2.5 percentage points. Monmouth surveyed 903 adults via telephone from Dec. 4 – Dec. 8 with a margin of error of +/- 3.3 percentage points.
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