Majority of Americans Support Removing Trump Through Impeachment, Echoing Nixon Polls
Fifty two percent of Americans support removing President Trump from office through impeachment, according to a new poll by Gallup.
This is the highest level of support found for removing Trump since the Ukraine scandal broke. In fact, backing for Trump’s impeachment has far surpassed the public support for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, and is edging into territory not seen since the 1970s, when Nixon stepped down from the presidency after support for impeachment spiked at 58 percent. “The level of support for Trump being impeached and removed,” Gallup reports, “is higher than it was for Nixon in all but the final poll before he resigned.”
Still, Gallup cautions, “The headwinds Trump faces are quite different from the ones faced by his embattled predecessors.” The key difference between Trump and Nixon, for now, is the highly partisan split. For a topic that was allegedly divisive, impeachment has united Democrats. Eighty-nine percent of Democratic voters now want Trump constitutionally removed from office. That holds true, too, for 55 percent of independents — a leap of 9 points from the last Gallup poll on this subject, in June. Republicans, by contrast, are holding firm in their support for Trump remaining in office. Only six percent of GOP voters want Trump impeached and removed, a decline of one point from June.
By the time Nixon departed the White House in a helicopter, nearly a third of Republicans backed his removal, in addition to 71 percent of Democrats. Still, support for Trump’s removal is much higher at this early stage in impeachment proceedings than it was for Nixon. At the beginning of the Watergate hearings in mid-1973, only 19 percent of Americans backed removing Nixon from office.
The House has begun an impeachment inquiry. Removing Trump from office would require the majority of the House to approve articles of impeachment, and for 67 senators to vote to convict the president after a trial.