Poll: Majority of Americans approve of Trump impeachment inquiry

A majority of Americans approve of House Democrats’ move to launch a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump, according to a new CBS News survey conducted by YouGov. 

The poll, which was released Sunday morning, found that 55 percent of Americans support an impeachment inquiry, with 35 percent strongly approving and 20 percent somewhat approving the move. Meanwhile, 45 percent of respondents said they disapprove of congressional Democrats’ decision to start an impeachment inquiry into Trump. 

{mosads}The show of public support for impeachment comes as Trump faces mounting scrutiny over revelations that he pressured the leader of Ukraine to investigate 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden over unsubstantiated allegations of corruption.

A whistleblower complaint released last week accuses the president of “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign government in the 2020 U.S. election.”

A White House memo of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also confirms that the president asked Zelensky to work with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr to investigate the Bidens. 

The developments led Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to shift her long-held resistance to impeachment and announce a formal inquiry Tuesday. 

Public support for impeachment splits heavily along partisan lines. The survey found that 87 percent of Democratic respondents are in support of the impeachment inquiry, while 77 percent of Republican respondents disapprove of it. 

The survey found that 23 percent of Republican respondents are in favor of an impeachment inquiry. In addition, 49 percent of Independents said they support an impeachment inquiry. Fifty-one percent said they do not support the effort. 

As a whole, 41 percent of respondents said Trump’s actions concerning Ukraine were illegal. Meanwhile, 28 percent of respondents, including a majority of Republicans, said Trump’s actions were proper. 

Forty-two percent of respondents also said Trump deserves to be impeached for his actions related to Ukraine. Thirty-six percent said that Trump does not deserve to be impeached over those actions, with another 22 percent saying that “it’s too soon to say.”

Impeachment has dominated discussion within the Democratic caucus for the past year. And public opinion polls have recently shown that citizens may now be more open to the process. 

For example, a new NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist survey found that 49 percent of Americans approve of impeachment. A recent Hill-HarrisX poll also found that 47 percent of Americans support impeachment. 

The CBS News-YouGov survey was conducted between Sept. 26 and Sept. 27 among a nationally representative population of 2,059 U.S. residents. The margin of error is 2.3 percentage points.