Memo: Voters Support Expanding the Impeachment Inquiry
By
Sean McElwee, Executive Director, Data for Progress;
John Ray, Senior Political Analyst, YouGov Blue;
Mark White, Senior Political Analyst, YouGov Blue
By the People
Credo
Free Speech For People
Executive Summary
Up until now, the central focus of the impeachment hearings has been Trump’s conduct regarding military aid to Ukraine. Here, we test other reasons to expand the inquiry. We find that substantial numbers of voters support an inquiry that focuses on obstruction of justice, seeking foreign interference in elections as well as additional grounds such as Trump’s bigotry, detention of immigrant families, and profiting off of his office. This memo briefly summarizes the results.
On net, voters favor impeaching and removing the president by a 49-44 margin, and also favor the current impeachment inquiry by a 49-44 margin. This includes about nine in ten Democrats, one in three independents, and about one in sixteen Republicans. As such, there is no longer any difference between supporting the current inquiry and supporting impeaching the president
About 42 percent of US voters support expanding the inquiry, about 9 percent want the inquiry to focus explicitly on Ukraine, about 3 percent of voters support the current inquiry but are unsure how they feel about whether it should expand, and 44 percent do not support the inquiry.
Support for the inquiry and support for impeachment are synonymous: Support for one does not differ from support for the other across the partisan spectrum.
Voters respond most clearly to supporting the inquiry on the grounds of pressuring a foreign government to interfere in domestic elections, and on the grounds of obstructing the inquiry.
When provided a list of possible reasons to expand the inquiry, of those reasons voters most strongly supported expanding the inquiry to investigate claims Trump accepted money from foreign governments through his businesses.
While the impeachment narrative current centers on Ukraine, we find voters are already nearly as supportive of impeachment on other grounds entirely, such as Trump’s family-separation of immigrants or his incitements of discrimination and bigotry.
There is little statistically consistent evidence for who can be moved in their opinion on the inquiry. Over the course of a survey battery providing several arguments in favor of the impeachment inquiry, we found only about 6 percent of voters could move toward the inquiry, with only about 1 percent moving from actively disfavoring the inquiry to favoring it.
