Sunday, 07 February 2021 (YJC) _ A new poll shows majority of Americans say Trump should be convicted.
With his impeachment trial set to begin this week, a narrow majority of Americans say they support the Senate convicting former President Donald Trump and barring him from holding federal office again, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll released Sunday.
Compared to public attitudes in the early days of his first impeachment trial, support for the Senate convicting Trump is higher now. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll published in late January 2020, when the first trial was ongoing but before senators had voted, 47% of Americans said the Senate should vote to remove Trump from office and 49% said he should not be removed.
But in this latest poll, 56% of Americans say Trump should be convicted and barred from holding office again, and 43% say he should not be. The new poll was conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News using Ipsos' KnowledgePanel.
Meanwhile, the attention on Capitol Hill last week focused more on the fate of a new Republican member of Congress who has faced backlash for espousing extremist views and support for the QAnon conspiracy theory in her past. That focus, which followed the deadly insurrection on the U.S. Capitol that Trump is accused of inciting, seems to have taken a toll on the public's perception of the party. By a 17-point margin, Americans say there are more radical extremists within the GOP than the Democratic Party.
On Jan. 13, Trump became the first president ever to be impeached by the House of Representatives twice, when a majority of the body's members voted in favor of charging Trump with "incitement of insurrection" for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
A key difference between this trial and the first is that Trump is no longer president and therefore cannot be removed from office.
It would take 67 senators to vote to convict Trump, meaning 17 Republicans would need to be on board, assuming every member of the Democratic caucus votes to convict. If enough senators vote to convict, the chamber could hold a second vote on whether to bar him from holding federal office again. That would only take a simple majority.
A few Republican senators have said, or have reportedly said, that they think Trump committed an impeachable offense.
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