What The First Few Post-Ukraine Polls Say About Impeachment

Poll(s) of the week

In the week since The Wall Street Journal first broke the news that President Trump allegedly pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son in a July phone call, six pollsters1 have released surveys asking Americans whether they support impeaching the president.

The polling we have so far mostly shows an uptick in support for impeachment. But according to the initial polls at least, public opinion doesn’t seem to have shifted dramatically from where it was following both the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on April 18 and Mueller’s testimony before Congress on July 24. The majority of Americans still do not favor impeachment, although more than two-thirds of Democrats do. There are several reasons, however, to believe that this picture is incomplete and could change.

First, although support for impeaching the president is shy of a majority, polling suggests that a majority of Americans do disapprove of Trump’s actions. A YouGov/Economist poll released Wednesday found that 52 percent of Americans said it is inappropriate for the president to request a foreign government open an investigation into a potential political opponent. (By contrast, 22 percent said it was appropriate, and 26 percent said they weren’t sure.) And in that same poll, 62 percent of Americans said that it is inappropriate for the president to threaten withholding foreign aid to a country if it refuses to “take an action which personally benefits the President.” (Only 14 percent said it is appropriate, and 24 percent were not sure.)

But as editor-in-chief Nate Silver pointed out on Tuesday, just because a majority disapproves of the president’s actions doesn’t mean a majority supports impeaching him. In the Quinnipiac University poll that came out after the publication of the Mueller report, for example, 54 percent of Americans thought Trump had “attempted to derail or obstruct the investigation into the Russian interference in the 2016 election,” and 46 percent thought Trump had committed crimes while president, but only 29 percent said Congress should begin the impeachment process.

So support for impeachment could remain low this time around, too, but it could also be different. A separate YouGov poll conducted Tuesday found that a majority of Americans may either “strongly” or “somewhat” support impeachment if Trump “suspended military aid to Ukraine in order to incentivize the country’s officials to investigate his political rival.”

And that’s not the only evidence to suggest that support for impeachment could increase. Of the five polls from which we have data so far, one is from a high-quality telephone pollster — Quinnipiac. And their latest poll shows a 5-percentage-point increase in support for impeachment overall and a 12-percentage-point increase among Democrats since they were last asked the question in July. Keep in mind, too, this poll went into the field on Sept. 19 — a full day before The Wall Street Journal first broke the story of Trump’s call with Zelensky, and only stayed in the field through Monday, the day before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-the-first-few-post-ukraine-polls-say-about-impeachment/