538: Our Poll Finds A Majority Of Americans Think The Evidence Supports Trump's Removal
After the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Trump on Dec. 18, the president’s fate is in the Senate’s hands. The process for the trial still isn’t clear, but there are signs that it will likely be smoother sailing for the president going forward: Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he will coordinate with White House counsel, and there’s no indication that the Senate is anywhere near the 67 votes needed to remove Trump from office. And according to our impeachment and removal polling trackers, there isn’t broad public support for that either — just 47 percent of Americans favor removing Trump.
But in the latest installment of our survey with Ipsos, where we use Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel to poll the same group of respondents every two weeks, a majority (57 percent) of Americans said they think Trump committed an impeachable offense. Fifty-two percent said they think Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine or his refusal to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry constitute enough evidence to remove him from office.
That might seem like good news for Democrats, since other recent polls have put support for removal in the low- to mid-40s — but the picture is complicated. As always, there are big partisan divisions: The vast majority of Democrats think there’s sufficient evidence to remove Trump from office, while most Republicans think there isn’t. And there is still a small but notable number of Americans who think there is enough evidence for removal, but also believe the upcoming presidential election — and not Congress — should determine whether Trump remains in office. Consistent with previous rounds of our survey, we found that about 15 percent of Americans think that there is enough evidence to remove Trump from office on matters related to Ukraine or his attempts to stymie the impeachment inquiry, but also think his fate should be decided by voters in the 2020 election, not Congress.
Most Americans want the trial to expand on the evidence in the impeachment articles
There might not be a broad consensus about whether Trump should be removed from office, but our survey found that a majority of the public is on the same page about one thing — they want a Senate trial with new witnesses who did not appear during the impeachment process in the House.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/our-poll-finds-a-majority-of-americans-think-the-evidence-supports-trumps-removal/
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