Voters Favor Trump’s Impeachment More Than Clinton’s

There’s more voter support for impeaching President Trump than there is for impeaching former President Clinton after all these years.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 48% of Likely U.S. Voters favor the impeachment of Trump by the U.S. House of Representatives. Nearly as many (46%) are opposed. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

By contrast, 42% favor the House’s decision to impeach Clinton in 1998. Thirty-eight percent (38%) are opposed. But 20% are undecided, perhaps in large part because it was so long ago.

The partisan difference is fascinating. While 76% of Democrats favor the impeachment of Republican Trump for allegedly pressuring a foreign government for political purposes, only 33% say the same of their fellow Democrat Clinton who committed perjury and obstruction of justice to conceal his affair with a 22-year-old White House intern.

But then 54% of Republicans favor the Clinton impeachment, but only 22% feel that way about Trump. Unaffiliated voters are more closely divided on both questions. Fifty percent (50%) of these voters, however, oppose Trump’s impeachment, while 20% are not sure about Clinton’s.

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The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted December 16-17, 2019 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

Voters see little chance that Republicans will jump on the Democrats’ Trump impeachment bandwagon. Most Democrats think that’s because of GOP party loyalty, but then most Republicans believe the impeachment is driven not by broken laws but by Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Women (56%) are a lot more supportive of impeaching Trump than men (39%) are. Voters under 40 are understandably the age group most undecided about the Clinton impeachment.

Sixty-two percent (62%) of blacks favor Trump’s impeachment, compared to 44% of whites and 52% of other minority voters. But blacks are the least enthusiastic about Clinton’s impeachment.

Seventy-seven percent (77%) of self-identified conservatives oppose Trump’s impeachment, but 56% of moderates and 87% of liberals are in favor of it.

While 96% of voters who Strongly Disapprove of Trump’s job performance favor his impeachment, just 35% say the same of impeaching Clinton.

Impeachment isn’t shaping up as the most critical issue in next year’s elections, and voters still tend to think Trump’s removal from office would hurt the economy. Democrats, of course, disagree.

In a survey last year, 53% of all voters described Bill Clinton as a sexual predator. But 69% said separately that his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, the 22-year-old intern, was consensual.

Additional information from this survey and a full demographic breakdown are available to Platinum Members only.

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