Politics • Analysis
To avoid removal, Trump needs senators representing only 7 percent of the country to support him
The House impeachment vote, however, largely mirrored what Americans in those districts wanted.

By Philip Bump
Dec. 19, 2019 at 12:02 p.m. EST

It is the nature of a representative democracy that people will sometimes be represented by politicians with whom they disagree. Ask a Republican in New York City how they feel about their representatives or ask a Democrat, well, anywhere, how they feel about their president. It’s the trade-off of having elections.

In general, though, the system works — in part because representatives generally reflect the will of the majority of people they represent. That was largely true following Wednesday’s vote in the House of Representatives to impeach President Trump. It will probably be less true once the impeachment fight moves to the Senate.

About 53 percent of the House members who voted Wednesday supported impeachment. Because each district in the House is about the same size, that means that 53 percent of the population of the country lives in districts whose members of Congress supported impeachment.


(Philip Bump/The Washington Post)

To our original point, that doesn’t mean that everyone in those districts supported how their representatives were voting. Compared with Post-ABC News polling completed this month, the vote in the House was more strongly pro-impeachment than are Americans overall. Support for impeachment in the House edged out opposition by about eight percentage points. In our poll, support for impeachment (and removal) was three points higher than opposition.

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In the Senate, where that vote on removal will take place, the picture is very different. There hasn’t been a vote on impeachment yet, and in fact most senators haven’t even stated a position on the issue. (Many, but not all, are declining to offer a position, acting under the theory that they are jurors in Trump’s impeachment trial.)

If we assume a party-line vote (which is essentially what happened in the House), 53 percent of senators would oppose impeachment — but more than half the country would live in states whose senators favored impeachment. (For these calculations, we assigned half of the state’s population to each senator to account for states with split-party senators. Independents were presumed to support removal.)
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(Philip Bump/The Washington Post)
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Philip Bump is a correspondent for The Washington Post based in New York. Before joining The Post in 2014, he led politics coverage for the Atlantic Wire. Follow https://twitter.com/pbump