Majority of Americans support ousting Trump from office, new poll shows
Seventy percent of Americans said President Donald Trump was wrong to pressure Ukraine’s leader to pursue probes into his political opponents, according to a new survey, and more than half of respondents indicated he should be removed from office.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll published Monday found that 51 percent of those surveyed believed Trump should be impeached by House lawmakers, as well as convicted by the Senate. Six percent said that while Trump’s actions were wrong and that he should be impeached, he should not be ousted by the Senate.
An additional 13 percent also deemed the president’s push for foreign investigations of his rivals to be wrong, but believed he should neither be impeached nor convicted by Congress. A quarter of respondents, 25 percent, said Trump did nothing wrong.
The survey’s findings come after the House impeachment inquiry’s first week of public hearings, which a majority of Americans have been monitoring. Among those polled, 21 percent said they have followed the proceedings “very closely” and 37 percent have followed the hearings “somewhat closely.”
A total of 42 percent of respondents say they followed last week’s testimony “not so closely” or “not closely at all.”
Still, only 21 percent said they made up their minds about impeachment after the hearings, and nearly one-third of respondents — 32 percent — reached a decision before news of the Ukraine scandal broke in September.
Last Wednesday, State Department officials George Kent and William Taylor testified before the House Intelligence Committee, and Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, appeared before the committee on Friday.
Beginning Tuesday, House impeachment investigators will hear testimony in open hearings from eight more witnesses, as the public phase of the Democrat-led inquiry into the president’s conduct enters its second week.
The Ipsos poll, conducted Nov. 16-17, was randomized and included a sample of 506 adults nationwide. The margin of error is plus or minus 4.8 percentage points.
