Republicans seem to think what Trump did was wrong. They just don't believe he did it.
The impeachment polls don't seem to be going President Trump's way, especially among key groups like women, college-educated white voters, and independents, Politico reports. A USA Today/Ipsos poll conducted Tuesday and Wednesday and released Thursday, for example, shows Americans support the House voting to impeach Trump by a 45 percent to 38 percent margin, and they want the Senate to convict and remove him from office, 44 percent to 35 percent. FiveThirtyEight launched an impeachment poll tracker that, as of Thursday, has support for impeachment up 46.7 percent to 45.1 percent.
There's a large partisan spread in the polling — only 12 percent of Republicans back impeachment, according to FiveThirtyEight's composite. But it doesn't appear that Republicans actually think what Trump did was okay. In the USA Today/Ipsos poll, 17 percent of Republicans support impeachment but 30 percent of Republicans say the president asking Ukraine to look into Biden's behavior would be an abuse of power. Furthermore, 80 percent of Republicans agreed that presidents are subject to the same laws as all other citizens.
A Monmouth University poll released Tuesday found that only 40 percent of Republicans believe that Trump mentioned the possibility of Ukraine investigating Biden in his July 25 phone call Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and 29 percent say Trump probably never mentioned it. Trump has publicly acknowledged asking Zelensky to investigate Biden, and according to the incomplete phone transcript released by the White House, Trump told him: "There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it ... It sounds horrible to me."
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"At the very least, it is clear from the readout that Trump discussed investigating Biden during the call," said Monmouth's Patrick Murray. That so many Republicans don't seem to know that, he told Politico, "told us how powerful partisan filters can be for just interpreting obvious facts."
The USA Today/Ipsos poll was conducted online among 1,006 adults and has a credibility interval of ±3.5 percentage points. Monmouth conducted its poll Sept. 23-29 among 1,161 adults, and its margin of error is ±2.9 points for the entire sample.
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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.
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