Democratic and Republican voters are becoming more entrenched in their views about whether Attorney General William Barr provided an accurate summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, according to a new poll.
A Hill-HarrisX survey conducted May 2-3 found that 76 percent of GOP respondents said the attorney general accurately described Mueller’s findings, up 6 points from a similar poll in April.
Among Democrats, 31 percent said the attorney general’s description was accurate, down from 39 percent in last month’s poll.
Overall, 53 percent of registered voters said Barr’s March 24 summary of legal conclusions reached by Mueller in his Russian interference investigation was “largely accurate,” while 47 percent said they were “largely inaccurate.”
In the May survey, respondents who described themselves as politically independent were 3 points more likely to describe Barr’s summary has mostly accurate compared to the earlier poll.
The overall numbers were little changed from an April 19-21 Hill-HarrisX poll that found a 54-46 split among respondents about the attorney general’s memorandum. The difference between the two polls is within the April survey’s 2-point sampling margin of error and the newer one’s 3-point confidence interval.
Congressional Democrats have condemned Barr in recent days for allegedly mischaracterizing Mueller’s findings, citing a letter that the special counsel wrote to Barr on the topic. President Trump and GOP lawmakers have hailed Mueller’s report as a “complete exoneration.”
The May survey found that 56 percent of independents had confidence in the Barr synopsis of Mueller’s findings, up 3 points from the previous poll. The shift is within the 6-point margin of error for this subgroup, however.
Both surveys were conducted online among statistically representative samples of registered voters with a 95 percent confidence level.
—Matthew Sheffield
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