Trump And GOP's Handling Of Impeachment Inquiry Get Low Marks In New Poll
Americans are evenly divided on congressional Democrats’ handling of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump, but disapprove of Trump and the congressional GOP’s actions, a new HuffPost/YouGov survey finds. The poll, conducted last week, also suggests public support for impeachment has reached at least temporary stasis following an initial bump last month.
The public is split on how Democrats in Congress have handled the inquiry so far, with 43% approving and an equal 43% disapproving. Just 36% approve of Trump’s handling, with half disapproving. Republicans in Congress fare the worst on this metric, with 31% approving and 52% disapproving.
A similar pattern emerges across other question: Americans are divided on how Democrats have responded, but they’re more solidly condemnatory of the White House and its allies. The public is close to evenly split on Democrats’ motives for the impeachment inquiry: 40% say it’s a good-faith attempt to get to the truth, with 43% saying it’s just playing politics. They’re similarly divided on whether Democrats are focusing too much on impeachment: 44% say they are, while 40% say the issue has gotten either the right level of attention or not enough of it. But Americans say by a slightly broader 10-point margin, 45% to 35%, that Trump is not doing enough to cooperate with the inquiry.
Views about impeachment, meanwhile, look much the same as they did in a previous HuffPost/YouGov poll taken at the end of September and the beginning of this month. In that poll, 44% of Americans supported impeachment and 40% were opposed. In the most recent survey, 45% support impeachment and 41% are opposed, for an identical 4-point margin.
Other metrics are similarly stable. In both polls, for instance, 36% of Americans said they considered Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president to be a “very serious” problem, with about half calling it at least somewhat serious. In both, only about an eighth of the public thought it was very likely that Trump would be impeached and removed from office.
That same general stability is evinced in other recent polls, including a Quinnipiac survey released Monday that concluded opinions on impeaching and removing Trump (46% in favor, 48% opposed) had barely budged from their previous polling, a CBS/YouGov poll that found “the partisan divide has hardened on impeachment matters in the last two weeks,” and FiveThirtyEight’s overall aggregate of impeachment and impeachment-inquiry polling. Trump’s job approval, meanwhile, has also remained largely stagnant.
It’s not entirely surprising that the initial bump in support for impeachment hasn’t immediately translated into further growth. Last month’s Ukraine revelations, and the burst of increased impeachment support among Democratic legislators that followed, carried enough weight to notably shift public opinion. Since then, further developments in the new shave been mostly incremental, and attention to the story has plateaued for the time being, leaving support for impeachment heightened, but not obviously on a track toward continued gains.
Use the widget below to further explore the results of the HuffPost/YouGov survey, using the menu at the top to select survey questions and the buttons at the bottom to filter the data by subgroups:
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted Oct. 9-10 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
HuffPost has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. More details on the polls’ methodology are available here.
Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some but not all potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.
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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
