Posted on 10/02/2019 1:07:17 PM PDT by Red Badger
An updating calculation of support for and opposition to impeachment, accounting for each poll's quality, recency, sample size and partisan lean, since Aug. 1, 2018
Updated Oct. 2, 2019, at 12:00 PM
Now that House Democrats are holding an official inquiry into allegations that President Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, FiveThirtyEight is following how public opinion responds with this preliminary impeachment polling tracker.
In addition to tracking the polling averages for and against impeachment among all Americans, which you can see in the chart above, we are also keeping tabs on how opinion breaks down along party lines. As you can see below, Democrats are strongly in favor of impeachment, Republicans are strongly opposed and independents hover somewhere in between.
To be clear, this is something we plan to build on in the coming weeks because there’s a lot we still don’t know. For example, will pollsters start phrasing questions about support for impeachment differently? And will that affect our averages? We’re not sure yet, but we’ll adjust as we go. For now we’re calculating these averages similarly to how we handle presidential approval ratings, which means we’re accounting for the quality of the pollster and each pollster’s house effects (whether they seem to yield unusually good or bad numbers for impeachment compared with the polling consensus). However, measuring public opinion on impeachment comes with some added curveballs. For one thing, pollsters often phrase questions about impeachment differently, which can affect responses. For another, the impeachment process itself is complicated — opening an impeachment inquiry was the beginning of a process that could eventually lead to Trump’s removal from office, but only after a bunch of intermediary steps — and many Americans don’t fully understand it. We haven’t taken these challenges lightly; indeed, we carefully weighed how to handle them methodologically, and in the name of transparency, we’re sharing our decisions with you.
First, we had to make a call on which polls to include. We are collecting all the polls we can find that ask respondents some version of whether they support impeaching Trump — yes or no.1 This means we’re excluding questions that provide multiple options like, “Do you think that, for his actions, President Trump should be impeached and removed from office, censured by Congress, or no action should be taken?” And we’re excluding questions that provide respondents with reasons that they might support impeachment like, “Do you think the Congress should or should not impeach and remove President Trump from office over allegations of obstruction of justice?”
But we are still including polls that use a number of different wordings: those that ask respondents whether Congress2 should begin an impeachment “inquiry” or “hearing”; those that ask more broadly about whether the “process” or “proceedings” of impeachment should begin; and those that ask whether Congress should “seriously consider” impeachment. In addition, we’re including questions that ask whether Congress should simply “impeach Trump” or whether the president should be “impeached and removed” from office.
Finally, we’re including all polls conducted since Aug. 1, 2018 — rather than at the beginning of Trump’s presidency — as that’s when polls on impeachment really started to proliferate. This could be because of the double dose of bad news Trump received on Aug. 21 (his former campaign manager Paul Manafort was convicted of financial fraud, and his former lawyer Michael Cohen said that during the 2016 campaign, at Trump’s direction, Cohen paid off two women to stay silent about their affairs with Trump), although the approach of the midterm elections might have had something to do with it as well. The number of impeachment polls spiked again this April, after former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference into the 2016 election was released, and they’ve come in a steady stream since then.
Our plan is to update these charts hourly with the latest polls for as long as the impeachment inquiry hangs in the air — so for the time being, bookmark this page to see public opinion evolve in real time.
See all the polls we’ve collected.
LATEST: 47% SUPPORT IMPEACHMENT, 45.1% DON’T SUPPORT
What the heck is wrong with America?
The trial in the Senate would be a hoot!
-PJ
Neither one is a majority.......................
475 are idiots.
True but I would prefer that Slick continue to wear the Scarlet I. After all he deserved it!
Impeachment supporters can’t articulate what crime is alleged. It’s just the latest iteration of “we don’t like him, and will support any means of making him go away.”
I think most Trump supporters are like BRING IT ON. And they know that an official impeachment will give Trump more opportunities to point out the left’s lies.
So when you add that to the people that don’t like Trump you get a majority.
Its 538 dot com who predicted a
90% Hillary win. Just ignore the MSM who is going to make push polls to drive their narrative.
Look at the charts in the original article. (They’re not pics so I can’t post them here.)
The level of support for impeachment hasn’t significantly changed since September 2018, during the height of the Mueller Report aftermath.
Haters gonna hate, and nothing’s changed.
You are going to see a series of push-polls intended to give Congress slime cover to vote yea.
No more real than any other polls the media has done recently.
47% are idiots.
These are push polls.
America will defend its president at the ballot box.
And President Trump will win big.
It was the same in the last election in 2016. All of the polls except an ignored few were wrong.
Sorry! That would not be funny at all.
I’m not sure whether to trust the polls or now. Normally I’d discount them as propaganda tools meant to influence behavior rather than simply observe it, which is unquestionably their new mode of operation. But I thought maybe they are going to try to be honest for a change because the Dems need to know how close to the edge of the cliff they are treading.
So my takeaway is: anything that is released publicly is the usual crap, biased and phony-facted if not made up out of whole cloth. But they’re doing private polling that we will never see, that tells the real truth.
I’m sure Brad Parscale is too, and I hope he uses it appropriately, because no true Trump Supporter is going to make up or change his mind based on any poll.
538? Really folks? Shaking head.
Only Dem’s and Lib’s.
Trump $125,000,000 small donations, donated in one month, All Democrats combined “Zero” when compared to Trumpie!!! And...the Trumpie number is rising like a shooting star. Forget any polls, “Money talks”...All else walks!!! End of Story!!!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.