Poll: 74 Percent of Democrats Don’t Believe Trump Will Be Removed From Office

President Donald Trump makes his way to board Air Force One before departing from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on Nov. 20, 2019. MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

Roughly seven in 10 Democrats said they don’t think President Donald Trump will be impeached and convicted in the Senate, according to a new poll.

House Democrats announced two articles of impeachment against the president on Tuesday, with a vote on impeachment coming as soon as next week.

But Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate and the GOP is widely expected to acquit Trump after a brief hearing. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said this week that a Senate impeachment trial would likely go quickly and that a vote might come as soon as the House presents their case, provided there’s “nothing new and dramatic.”

According to a new poll conducted before the articles were announced, a majority of voters in both parties, and Independents, all agree that it’s unlikely Trump is both impeached and removed from office.

Sixty-one percent of Democrat respondents to the YouGov/Yahoo survey (pdf) said that Trump will be impeached but not convicted and another 13 percent said they don’t think Trump will be impeached.

Just 13 percent said they believe Trump will be impeached and convicted by the Senate. A conviction requires a two-thirds concurrence by the Senators present.

Nearly half of Republican respondents, 47 percent, said Trump won’t be impeached while most of the rest, 42 percent, said they think he will be impeached but won’t be removed from office.

(L-R) House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), House Committee on Oversight and Reform Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). Pelosi speaks as Democrats announced articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump during a press conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Dec. 10, 2019. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Independents were, as usual, the middle ground in terms of views on impeachment, but more similar to Republican respondents. About a third of Independents, 36 percent, said Trump will be impeached but not removed from office while 28 percent said he will not be impeached.

Twenty-seven percent said they’re not sure, along with 12 percent of Democrats and 8 percent of Republicans.

Nine percent of Independents said Trump will be impeached and convicted, along with 3 percent of Republicans.

Respondents did indicate a preference for both impeachment and removal from office, despite the belief that those two things wouldn’t happen, though the numbers may have been skewed because there were more Democrat respondents (471) than Republican ones (360).

Respondents said they were following the hearings at least a little; a quarter said they were following them very closely and another 23 percent said they were following somewhat closely. A majority said that Trump asked a foreign leader to investigate a political opponent, referring to the president’s request to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to “look into” allegations of past corruption by former Vice President Joe Biden.

Biden, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, infamously bragged last year that in 2016 he threatened to withhold $1 billion from Ukraine unless then-President Petro Poroshenko ousted Viktor Shokin, a prosecutor who was probing the employer of Biden’s son.

The survey was conducted among 1,500 adults, including 1,017 registered voters. The margin of the error for the full sample was plus/minus 2.8 percent; for the registered voters, it was plus/minus 3.4 percent.