Even Fox’s Polling is Showing Record Support for Booting Trump Out
Credit to Author: Tim Marcin| Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 14:14:56 +0000
Polls on impeachment are painting an ugly picture for President Donald Trump, and the latest blow came from his favorite cable news channel: a Fox News survey found more than half of American voters support impeaching him and removing him from office.
The poll, released on Wednesday, found a new high of 51 percent of registered voters want Trump impeached and removed, while another 4 percent want him impeached but not removed. Just 40 percent opposed impeachment.
There is, predictably, a divide on impeachment along party lines. Eighty-five percent of Democrats support impeachment and removal, compared with 39 percent of independents and 13 percent of Republicans.
READ: Trump’s legal position on impeachment is bananas
Though Democrats worried for months about the politics of impeachment, it seems support for it has only risen since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi officially announced an inquiry in late September over Trump’s actions with Ukraine’s president.
Voters of all backgrounds increasingly support impeachment, according to the new Fox poll. Since July, support for impeachment rose 11 percentage points among Democrats, 5 points among Republicans and 3 points among independents.
The Fox poll interviewed 1,003 registered voters from October 6 through October 8. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
READ: Here are 7 crimes Trump might have committed in this Ukraine scandal
Overall, recent polls have shown an increase in support for impeaching Trump. The FiveThirtyEight tracker on the subjects shows a sharp uptick since late September, coinciding with the flood of news about Ukraine. As of Thursday, FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls had 49.2 percent of Americans supporting impeachment, with 43.3 percent not supporting.
The rise in support for impeachment might be cause for concern in the White House. Impeachment is, after all, a political process. And while most GOP members of Congress have stayed aboard the Trump train thus far, it would stand to reason they’d hop off if their political futures were jeopardized.
Republican Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, for instance, hasn’t outright supported impeachment but did say on Friday that “the President’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling.”
Other GOP members of Congress are leaving the door open as well.
“I certainly wouldn’t vote to impeach on the basis of what I’ve seen so far,” Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a former executive director of the Republican National Committee, told CNBC this week. “I’m not going to rule it in or out.”
Cover: President Donald Trump answers questions from reporters during an event on "transparency in Federal guidance and enforcement" in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
This article originally appeared on VICE US.