Did Americans Support Removing Trump From Office?

On Feb. 5, 2020, the Senate acquitted President Trump after he was tried on two articles of impeachment, bringing more than four months of impeachment-related news to a close. With the trial over, we have also stopped tracking public opinion on the process. What follows is a timeline of how Americans felt about Trump’s impeachment and the possibility of removing him from office.

To better understand where Americans stood (both overall and by party), we at FiveThirtyEight tracked polls that focused on removing Trump from office (i.e., the Senate side of the process) separately from those that focused on his impeachment (i.e., the House side of the process). The removal tracker above includes questions we hadn’t tracked during the House phase, like those that asked about removal but not impeachment, or those that mentioned impeachment only as a precondition for removal, without asking respondents their opinion of the impeachment itself.

Polls asking about the House impeachment process aren’t included above but are included in the chart below, which contains polls that focused mainly on impeachment or focused equally on impeachment and removal, regardless of whether they were conducted before or after the House voted to impeach Trump on Dec. 18.

In short, the chart at the top of this page tracked support for removal on its own. The chart below tracked support for the impeachment process more holistically.

The buttons below the impeachment tracker allow you to toggle between three separate views: First, the default view is an average of all polls asking about the impeachment process. The other two views filter the polls to show you a subset of all impeachment polls. The middle button shows an average of polls that asked whether respondents supported Congress beginning an impeachment inquiry or whether they approved of the impeachment process. (This includes questions that were asked before the inquiry was announced, like, “Would you like to see Congress begin the process to impeach President Donald Trump, or not?” It also includes questions that were asked after the investigation began, like, “Do you approve or disapprove of the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry into President Trump?”) The final button shows an average of polls that asked whether respondents thought Trump should be “impeached” or “impeached and removed”; this view also includes polls conducted after the House’s impeachment vote about whether respondents approved of the vote.

In addition to tracking the polling averages for and against impeachment among all Americans, we also kept tabs on how opinion broke down by party. As you can see below, Democrats were strongly in favor of impeachment, Republicans were strongly opposed, and independents hovered somewhere in between.

And if you’re interested in the individual polls we collected, you can find them listed below. Polls labeled “remove” are included in the topmost chart, the one exclusively tracking removal, and polls labeled “begin” or “impeach” are included in the lower charts focused on the impeachment process.