Trump boasts of seemingly nonexistent polls showing support for impeachment in the 20s

President Trump is citing impeachment numbers that seem to exist nowhere but his Twitter feed.

Trump on Monday morning boasted that "support for impeachment is dropping like a rock," claiming that it's "down into the 20s" in some polls.

But he didn't cite a single example, and no one's sure where he's getting that number from considering virtually every poll has shown support for impeachment in the 40s, with FiveThirtyEight's poll tracker showing it's at an average of 46.3 percent support.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Some polls have certainly shown support lower than others, but the Daily Mail's David Martosko observes, "the lowest support for impeachment in any public poll since they started coming out in September is 43 percent," meaning Trump apparently shaved off a good 20 points in his tweet.

It's possible Trump is referring just to support for impeachment among Republicans, but in that case, the number would be an odd one to boast about considering per FiveThirtyEight, Republican support for impeachment is actually about 12 percent on average.

There are plenty of actual findings in real polls that Trump could have easily flagged, including that national support for impeachment on average has indeed dropped a few points since October — but to the tune of about four percentage points. The nearly 20-point plunge Trump is claiming? Not so much.