The latest polls show that Americans are evenly split on whether or not Donald Trump should be impeached, and that two weeks of televised hearings have failed to change many minds about the situation.
According to the most recent Yahoo News /YouGov poll, conducted November 20 through 22, Americans are largely evenly split on whether or not Trump should be impeached and removed from office. 48 percent believe that Trump should be impeached and removed from office, while 45 percent believe he should not. The remaining seven percent are undecided.
The numbers come after two weeks during which the impeachment hearings were played on every TV in the country, and then analyzed and dissected by cable and network news crews. Some of the testimony has even been described as “damning.”
And yet, the two weeks of televised hearings appear to have done little to convince a majority of Americans that Trump should be impeached and removed from office. However, Yahoo News writer Andrew Romano posits that the fact that seven percent of voters haven’t made up their minds on impeachment suggests that there are some whose minds could yet be changed.
As is always the case with these things, there’s a deep partisan divide within the poll results.
Among Republican voters, 83 percent oppose Trump’s impeachment and removal from office. By the exact same percentage, Democrats support Trump’s impeachment and removal. 40 percent of Independents support impeaching Trump and removing him from office.
Similarly, there’s a partisan divide when it comes to what the likely outcome of the process will be. Among voters overall, only 11 percent believe that Trump will be impeached and removed from office, while 41 percent expect Trump to be impeached but not removed from office. 54 percent of Democrats believe the same thing, while 56 percent of Republicans believe that Trump won’t even be impeached at all.
As to how much attention voters are paying to the impeachment process, Democrats appear to be watching it intently, as 56 percent admitted they were watching the process “very closely” or “somewhat closely.” By comparison, 45 percent of Republicans said the same.
The news isn’t all good for Trump, however. Voters still, by a somewhat-slim majority, believe that Trump committed the crimes he’s being investigated for in the impeachment inquiry. 58 percent have said they believe the president “asked a foreign leader to investigate a political opponent”; 51 percent said they believe he “withheld military aid to Ukraine until they agreed to conduct the investigations he wanted”; and 51 percent said they believe he “abused his powers as president.”