Just over half the respondents to a new poll conducted between Oct. 6 and Oct. 8 said they support the impeachment and removal of President Donald Trump — a sign that criticisms of the embattled Republican's remarks to Ukrainian and Chinese leaders may be sticking.
The poll conducted by Fox News, Beacon Research and Shaw & Company asked 1,003 randomly-selected voters from across the country their opinions about the president and other elected officials. None fared especially well in respondents' estimations, but Trump especially took a drubbing.
Fifty-one percent said they support Trump being impeached and removed from office — a new high. Another four percent indicated they want impeachment proceedings to move forward, but don't necessarily support his removal from office yet. Forty percent of respondents were opposed to impeachment and removal.
That's a nine-point swing from July, when 42 percent of respondents to a similar poll said they supported impeachment and removal. Since then, support for impeachment increased by 11 points among Democrats, five points among Republicans and three points among independents.
The margin of error for the poll was plus or minus three percent.
Trump's job approval ratings also slumped in the poll. About 42 percent of respondents said they approve of the job Trump is doing, while 55 percent disapprove.
Of course, Trump's colleagues didn't do so well in the poll either. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat who announced the impeachment investigation into Trump, was viewed favorably by 42 percent of poll respondents and unfavorably by 48 percent of respondents.
Respondents didn't particularly like U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democrat who is leading the impeachment inquiry, either — if they had an opinion about him at all. Twenty-seven percent of respondents viewed him favorably, while 33 percent did not.
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Republican who would likely oversee the president's trial in the Senate should it come to that, is also not super-popular. Twenty-six percent of respondents viewed him favorably, while 49 percent viewed him unfavorably.
McConnell has predicted impeachment efforts would fail in the Senate and even launched a fundraising campaign based on Democrats' efforts.
Trump faces impeachment proceedings brought by Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives over a phone call between the president and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump appeared to offer the release of U.S. aid to Ukraine in exchange for an investigation into Democratic Party presidential primary hopeful and former Vice President Joe Biden.
The president's critics — including Democrats but also U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, a Republican — say the president broke the law with those statements and subsequent public statements asking Ukraine and China to investigate Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, who served on the board of an energy company in Ukraine.
During his time as vice president, Biden pushed Ukraine to remove Viktor Shokin, a prosecutor there long-thought to be corrupt. Trump alleges that the elder Biden did so because that prosecutor was investigating his son. Thus far, there is no evidence that this was the case — and a number of statements from officials both in the U.S. and Ukraine, including U.S. Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, have suggested that the prosecutor who was removed was indeed suspected of corruption.
Trump later doubled down on his calls for other countries to look into his rivals, publicly asking China to investigate the Bidens in an Oct. 3 appearance outside the White House. The president has indicated he does not believe that is improper — something legal experts and most poll respondents say is false. Sixty-six percent of the respondents to Fox News' poll said they believed asking a foreign power to investigate rivals is "improper."
The president took to Twitter today to blast the Fox News poll and the news channel as a whole, which has been strongly favorable to the president in general in its coverage.
"From the day I announced I was running for President, I have NEVER had a good @FoxNewsPoll," he tweeted. "Whoever their Pollster is, they suck. But @FoxNews is also much different than it used to be in the good old days."
