Trump Impeachment Support Rising In New Poll As Nearly Half Say ‘Impeach!’ While Approval Rating Ticks Down
After a slight spike in his overall approval rating earlier this week, Donald Trump saw his approval headed back down after Wednesday, according to the daily average of all approval polls compiled by the data site FiveThirtyEight.com. Just as Trump’s job approval numbers started to drop, a separate new poll shows that support for impeaching Trump is on the rise among Americans, even as democratic leaders in the House of Representatives continue to take a slow-walking approach to the impeachment question.
Earlier this month in his average approval rating, Trump saw a small uptick according to the FiveThirtyEight average, rising from 41.5 percent to 42.9 in the week between May 1 and May 7. But the data site’s founder and editor-in-chief Nate Silver said, via his Twitter account, that he saw nothing significant in the small changes either way in Trump’s approval.
“I know other methods differ, but I think our approval ratings average is pretty good at avoiding false positives, and it isn’t seeing anything especially interesting going on with Trump’s approval rating,” Silver wrote. “For the past year or so, Trump has generally topped out at 42/43 in slow news periods, and that’s where he is right now. Certainly possible he’ll go higher but we aren’t seeing that yet.”
Silver’s caution came amid reports of individual polls that showed higher jumps in Trump’s approval than in the overall average. CNN columnist Chris Cilizza on Tuesday declared that “Donald Trump is more popular than ever before.”
The reports of Trump’s sudden rise in popularity appear to be inaccurate. But what apparently is accurate is that the popularity of Trump’s impeachment is higher than ever before, at least according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, released earlier this week. In the poll, support for Trump’s impeachment reached 45 percent. That’s a five-point increase from the last time Reuters/Ipsos asked the question, in mid-April.
Another 42 percent opposed impeaching Trump — roughly the same percentage who say that they approve of Trump in the FiveThirtyEight average. But in a Reuters/Ipsos approval rating poll also made public last week, only 39 percent said that they approve of the job Trump is doing — a number three points lower than the percentage who say that Trump should not be impeached.
Despite the new poll numbers showing growing support for Trump’s impeachment, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continued to insist that her party, despite holding a majority of seats in the House, must proceed with caution when it comes to beginning impeachment proceedings against Trump.
“This is very methodical, it’s very Constitution-based,” Pelosi said, as quoted by Reuters. “We won’t go any faster than the facts take us, or any slower than the facts take us.”
