'74 Nixon Levels: CNN Poll Finds 42 percent of Americans Support Impeaching Trump
A recent poll conducted by the SSRS for CNN reportedly shows that, among the people they surveyed, 42 percent supported the idea of impeaching President Donald Trump. It's a figure just one percent shy of the percentage of Americans clamoring to impeach President Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal in 1974.
CNN's main aim was to measure the pulse of the American populace when it comes to the ongoing investigation being headed by Robert Mueller, about the possible Russian influence linked to Trump during the 2016 presidential elections.
Along the way, this interesting tidbit came up in their data. Extrapolating from their results, 42 percent of Americans are of the opinion that Trump should be impeached and removed from office.
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As expected, it's a vote that has clear divisions among party lines with 77 percent of self-proclaimed Democrats agreeing with removing Trump from office, while a scant nine percent of Republicans agree.
Even then, 42 percent is just a notch shy of the 43 percent of Americans supporting the impeachment of former President Richard Nixon in 1974, as collected by Harris. As CNN pointed out, that's already a great deal higher than the 29 percent of popular opinion that contributedto eventually pushed President Bill Clinton out of office in 1998.
Twenty-nine percent is also a similar level of discontent measured during the terms of Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, with close to the same percentages of Americans wanting them impeach. That level, then, is for practical purposes, "a baseline of pro-impeachment sentiment for a modern president," according to CNN's Grace sparks.
With support for Trump's impeachment seemingly much higher than that "baseline" level, it's surprising that Democratic lawmakers have basically avoided the issue altogether, for the most part. Efforts to bring the issue of impeachment to the floor simply do not have the support of the big names from both sides of the aisle.
"I do not think that impeachment is a policy agenda," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said in a statement last month.
