Nearly 60 percent say Trump should have been convicted in impeachment trial

Nearly 60 percent of Americans believe former President Trump should have been convicted during his second Senate impeachment trial, an ABC News-Ipsos poll taken shortly after the trial ended shows.

Fifty-eight percent of Americans surveyed in the new poll, which was conducted from Feb.13 to 14 and is based on a nationally representative probability sample of 547 adults, said Trump should have been convicted by the upper chamber on charges that he incited the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol last month.

The Senate acquitted Trump on Saturday by a 57-43 vote. A conviction would have required two-thirds voting to convict, or 67 votes.

The poll found that support for the conviction was starkly partisan. Almost 90 percent of respondents polled who identified as Democrats said they believe the former president should have been convicted, compared to 64 percent of those identifying as independents and 14 percent of those identifying as Republicans who said the same.

A majority of respondents agreed that the evidence brought against the former president during the trial was strong. Most polled also said they believed that senators voted during the trial based on what party they belonged to. 

Fifty-six percent of respondents in the new poll said they thought the evidence against Trump in the trial was strong, while 37 percent said they thought it was weak.

A closer look at the respondents’ respective political parties also showed a clear partisan divide regarding the evidence. In the poll, most respondents identifying as Democrats said they believed the evidence in the trial was strong, compared to a minority of self-identified Republican respondents who said the same.

Seventy-seven percent of those polled also said they believed partisan ties played a role in how senators voted. By comparison, just 23 percent of those polled said they thought senators cast their vote based on the facts presented. 

The poll said respondents identifying as Republicans and Democrats believed in “nearly equal numbers” that “the senators voted based on politics.”

The poll was conducted using KnowledgePanel, which Ipsos described as the “largest and most well-established online probability-based panel that is representative of the adult US population.”

It was conducted in Spanish and English and the data was “weighted to adjust for gender by age, race/ethnicity, education, Census region, metropolitan status, household income, and party identification,” the market research company said.

“The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4.8 percentage points at the 95% confidence level, for results based on the entire sample of adults,” the company added. “The margin of sampling error takes into account the design effect, which was 1.34.”