About one-in-three Americans say House Democrats should begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump, according to a recent poll.
A Hill-HarrisX survey conducted May 25-26 found that 35 percent of registered voters said they supported impeachment proceedings against Trump, compared with 45 percent who disagreed. Twenty percent said they unsure or didn’t know.
The poll was conducted just days before now-former special counsel Robert Mueller made his first public remarks on the 22-month Russia investigation that concluded in March. Mueller said that if his office “had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” giving momentum to House Democrats who have been calling for impeachment.
A similar Hill-HarrisX survey in November 2018, days before the midterm elections, found that 40 percent of respondents favored initiating impeachment proceedings if Democrats were to take control of the House. The same poll showed 41 percent of voters opposing impeachment proceedings.
In the new poll, 59 percent of Democratic respondents said they supported beginning the impeachment process, down from 66 percent in the November survey.
In November, 36 percent of respondents who identified as independents said the House should begin impeachment proceedings, compared with 31 percent who said the same in May.
Support for impeachment among Republicans has remained about the same, with only a small minority of GOP voters favoring the idea. Fourteen percent of GOP respondents favored impeaching Trump in November, while 13 percent favored it more recently.
Democratic lawmakers have been debating whether to impeach Trump, but thus far Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has not come out in favor of it. Several of the party’s 2020 presidential candidates have called for beginning impeachment proceedings or launching an impeachment inquiry.
The Hill-HarrisX survey in May involved 1,001 registered voters and has a sampling margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
—Matthew Sheffield
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