Pollster Emily Ekin said Thursday that Americans have misconceptions about what impeachment actually means amid some Democrats’ calls to impeach President Trump.
“I think that people misunderstand what the word impeachment means,” Ekin, the director of polling at the Cato Institute, told Hill.TV’s Joe Concha on “What America’s Thinking.”
“From the moment Donald Trump was elected, before he even had a chance to do anything, people were ready to impeach him because they view it as ‘well, can we have a do-over?’ ” she continued.
Multiple Democratic lawmakers, including Reps. Maxine Waters (Calif.) and Al Green (Texas), have moved to impeach the president over the objections of party leadership.
Green has moved twice to force votes on articles of impeachment in the House, motions which were both rejected.
Republicans and Trump have used the threat of impeachment to galvanize GOP voter turnout ahead of the 2018 midterms.
“We have to keep the House, because if we listen to Maxine Waters, she’s going around saying ‘We will impeach him,’ ” Trump said at a campaign rally in April.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) issued a warning on campaigning on impeachment, saying it could backfire on Democrats.
“I think it’s a gift to the Republicans,” Pelosi said in an interview with Rolling Stone earlier this month.
“Because people really want to know how we will improve their lives. We don’t really know what [Robert] Mueller has. We have a responsibility, if we have information, to act upon it. But we don’t know what Mueller has. Republicans in the House have completely blocked any investigations — to a stupid extent, in my view,” she added, referring to Mueller’s probe into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia’s election meddling.
— Julia Manchester
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