AP-NORC poll: Public doubts Senate trial will be revealing.
WASHINGTON >> Americans are sharply divided along party lines about whether President Donald Trump should be removed from office, and they doubt the Senate impeachment trial will do anything to change their minds, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Overall, the public is slightly more likely to say the Senate should convict and remove Trump from office than to say it should not, 45% to 40%. But a sizable percentage, 14%, say they don’t know enough to have an opinion.
Americans on both sides of the debate say they feel strongly about their positions, and three-quarters say it’s not very likely or not at all likely that the trial will introduce new information that would change their minds.
Linda Valenzuela, 46, of Las Cruces, New Mexico, leans Democrat and said she is certain that Trump acted unlawfully in pressuring Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to investigate activities by former Vice President Joe Biden, a Trump political rival, and his son Hunter in the Eastern European nation.
But Valenzuela also said that it is “not at all likely” that she will hear anything from Trump’s defense team during the trial that would change her mind about the president.
“I know what he did was not legal,” she said.
Similarly, Jackie Perry, 59, a Republican from Carrollton, Georgia, said that she was certain that Trump had acted within the law. She said she could not envision her position on Trump changing because of evidence or testimony presented in the trial.
Perry, who cast her first-ever ballot in the presidential election in 2016 for Trump, said her opinion of the president is shaped by how he’s handled the economy. The national unemployment rate is 3.5% and has been hovering near a 50-year-low for months.
“This is a person who has helped our country, I think, more than any president has,” Perry said. “He’s done so much for us. Our economy is flourishing again for the first time in many years. There are ‘help wanted’ signs everywhere you go now. Our country is getting back up again. That to me is the important thing.”
About 8 in 10 Republicans think the Senate should not convict and remove Trump from office, compared with roughly the same share of Democrats who say Trump should be convicted and removed. Overall, confidence in the Senate to conduct a fair trial of the president is limited, though Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say it will be a fair trial.
A slim majority of Republicans think Trump has done nothing wrong in his interactions with Ukraine’s president, though that share has declined slightly from an AP-NORC poll in October — 64% then compared with 54% now. Roughly another third now think Trump did something unethical but not illegal, while just about 1 in 10 thinks he did something illegal.
By comparison, roughly three-quarters of Democrats say Trump did something illegal in his interactions with Zelenskiy
Democrats brought articles of impeachment against Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress for actions related to his decision to temporarily withhold nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine last year.