Only 3 in 10 Americans say they think it’s even somewhat likely that Donald Trump will be ousted from the presidency, a new HuffPost/YouGov survey finds.
Just 14% say they think it’s very likely that Trump will be impeached and removed from office, with 16% saying it’s somewhat likely, 24% that it’s not very likely and 32% that it’s not likely at all. The survey was taken before Democrats voted Thursday to formalize the impeachment process.
Americans are close to evenly split on how congressional Democrats are handling the inquiry with 40% approving and 43% disapproving. They say by a 6-percentage-point margin that the party is playing politics rather than making a good-faith attempt to get to the truth. By a slim 4-point margin, they respond that the party is focusing too much on impeachment rather than the right amount or too little.
The GOP, however, fares worse. Americans give negative ratings to both Trump (36% approve, 49% disapprove) and congressional Republicans (31% approve, 48% disapprove) for their handling of the inquiry and say by a 12-point margin that Trump is not doing enough to cooperate with the inquiry.
Twenty percent of Americans say they’d like to see the House hold a vote now on whether to impeach Trump, and 30% say that the House should continue its inquiry. And 31% say the inquiry should be dropped altogether.
Support For Impeachment Has Largely Stabilized
The three most recent HuffPost/YouGov polls ― taken Oct. 15-17, Oct. 22-24 and Oct. 29-31 ― all find public opinion on impeachment essentially where it stood at the end of last month. Americans say, 45% to 39%, that Trump should be impeached and removed from office, the most recent survey finds. Since Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi first announced her backing of an impeachment inquiry, support for impeachment has fluctuated in the 44%-48% range.
Not every poll has looked quite so stable. A few other recent surveys, from CNN/SSRS and Quinnipiac, found support for impeachment continuing to tick up. But overall, according to FiveThirtyEight’s aggregate, impeachment support appears to have leveled off somewhere just shy of the 50% mark nationally, and it’s lower in some battleground states.
That opinions aren’t continuing to rapidly shift isn’t surprising. After an initial flurry of revelations about Trump’s July 25 conversation with the Ukrainian president and a corresponding surge in support for impeachment among Democratic officials, subsequent news about the probe has been generally more incremental.
There may also be limited room for impeachment support to grow further. Views about impeaching the president, unsurprisingly, have always been polarized. But with Democrats and sympathetic independents taking a cue from their elected officials, support for impeachment has grown increasingly close to a proxy for presidential disapproval. In September, Americans were 9 percentage points likelier to disapprove of Trump than they were to support impeaching him, according to an analysis from The Economist. This month, the gap between those numbers narrowed to 4 points.
There’s also, of course, the possibility that the impeachment inquiry could broaden the pool of Americans who dislike Trump. So far, however, Trump’s overall ratings have remained well within the narrow range they’ve occupied throughout most of his presidency.
Use the widget below to further explore the results of the Oct. 29-31 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. 29-31 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.