538 "A Majority Of Americans Want To Bar Trump From Office"

[NRaleighLiberal]

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-majority-of-americans-want-to-bar-trump-from-office/

by Laura Bronner

Former President Donald Trump is the only president to have been impeached twice by the House of Representatives. And the fact that his second impeachment trial will now happen after he’s already left office further complicates things. (In addition to being the only president to be impeached twice, he is the only president to face an impeachment trial after leaving office.)

As a sign of where things are headed: Just five Senate Republicans agreed that the trial was constitutional in an earlier procedural vote in January, suggesting that it is extremely unlikely Democrats garner the 17 Republican votes necessary to convict Trump. Public opinion, though, does show a majority supported Trump’s impeachment — 53 percent, on average, said they supported Trump being removed from office before he left the White House on Jan. 20.

(graph here at the link)

That’s more support than in 2019, when only around 48 percent said the same when Trump was acquitted by the Senate on both articles of impeachment: charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress after pressuring Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate now-President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

However, as was true in 2019, there is a slight difference between support for Trump’s impeachment, which takes place in the House of Representatives, and support for his conviction in the Senate — the step that would have removed him from office, were he still there, and could lead to him being barred from running for federal office again. Right now, recent polls show that support for conviction sits at about 50 percent; that 3-percentage-point difference in support is similar to the difference in 2019, when support for removal hovered just marginally below support for impeachment throughout the process.

snip - read the rest at the link

[lettucebe]

1. I'd like him barred from the planet, but it's not yet an option