New Fox News poll has support for impeaching and removing Trump steady at 50 percent

Half of American voters support impeaching President Trump and removing him from office, while 41 percent oppose impeachment, according to a Fox News poll released Sunday. That's a tiny uptick from late October, when Fox News' pollsters found support for impeaching and removing Trump at 49 percent. The steadiness of those numbers is "fairly remarkable considering all that happened between those two polls," Fox News says. Trump's approval rating, meanwhile, has risen 2 percentage points to 45 percent, with 53 percent disapproving of his job performance.

There is a clear partisan split in the impeachment polling — 85 percent of democrats and a new high of 45 percent of independents favor impeaching and removing Trump, while 84 percent of Republicans disapprove. Most voters said Trump has done potentially impeachable things, the poll found, including 53 perfect who believed he abused the power of his office. A 48 percent plurality said he obstructed Congress, and 47 percent agreed Trump held up military aid to Ukraine to pressure its president to investigate his political rivals.

By a 16-point margin, voters said Republicans are more interested in protecting Trump than actually believe he did nothing impeachable; by 6 points, they said Democrats believe he committed an impeachable offense rather than want to hurt him politically. But nationally, impeachment is essentially a wash, with voters slightly more willing to vote for incumbents who vote to impeach Trump.

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On Fox News Sunday, anchor Eric Shawn focused on how the poll might show impeachment helping Trump politically.

The poll was conducted Dec. 8-11 by Beacon Research (D) and Shaw & Co. (R) among 1,000 registered voters nationwide. It has a margin of sampling error of ±3 percentage points. In FiveThirtyEight's impeachment polling aggregation, 48 percent support impeaching Trump and 45.9 percent oppose it.