Americans narrowly support convicting Trump.

A majority of Americans support convicting former President Donald Trump on an impeachment charge over his role in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, but only by a slender margin, according to a range of recent polls.

While there is broad agreement that Trump deserves at least some blame for the violence at the Capitol, the country remains more closely split over whether he deserves to be convicted by the Senate. In fact, views around this impeachment trial do not differ enormously from how things looked a year ago, when public opinion was tilted slightly in favor of removing Trump from office during his first impeachment trial. He was acquitted in February 2020 on a nearly party-line vote.

Democrats have since gained control of the Senate, but they would still need a significant number of Republican senators to defect to attain the twothirds majority needed to convict Trump. If he were convicted, senators could hold a second vote on whether to bar him from running for office again; that vote would require only a simple majority.

In a CBS News/YouGov poll released Tuesday, 56% of Americans said the Senate should convict the former president, while 44% said he should be acquitted. But opinions are squishy at the center, and support for impeachment was noticeably lower in other recent polls where respondents were given the option to express ambivalence.

An Associated Press/ NORC survey released last week invited Americans to indicate if they hadn’t developed an opinion either way. Twelve percent fell into that category, dropping the share favoring impeachment to 47%; 40% were opposed. A Quinnipiac University poll also out last week found that 50% of Americans said the Senate should convict Trump, while 45% said it shouldn’t.

Those numbers run well behind the share of Americans who say that Trump bears at least some responsibility for what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Sixty-three percent of Americans said so in the AP/NORC poll, including 50% who said he was highly responsible for it.

Within the Republican Party, Trump’s influence remains strong. Not only do an overwhelming share of Republicans say that he should be acquitted, they also continue to believe the dubious storylines that he promoted on the road to Jan. 6.

According to the CBS poll, most Republicans say they would at least entertain the idea of ditching the GOP if Trump formed a new party of his own.