Most in new poll say Trump should be convicted, barred from federal office

A slim majority of Americans think the Senate should convict former President Trump in his upcoming impeachment trial and bar him from being able to hold federal office in the future, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll has found.

The new poll, which was conducted Friday and Saturday and has a nationally representative probability sample of 508 respondents, found that 56 percent of Americans backed the both actions.

That support was starkly partisan, however. More than 9 in 10 Democrats backed both conviction and a ban on holding public office in the future, while 8 in 10 Republicans opposed both.

Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate is scheduled to take place this week and comes after 10 Republicans joined every Democrat in voting to impeach the former president on charges that he incited the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. A mob breached the building in an effort to disrupt Congress as it counted the Electoral College votes that showed President Biden won the election.

Convicting Trump in the Senate requires a two-thirds majority. In the unlikely event that 17 Republicans join Democrats and Trump is convicted, the Senate could take a second vote, which requires only a simple majority, to ban him from holding federal public office in the future.

Respondents were also asked which major political party they thought had more radical extremists. According to the poll, 42 percent of respondents said there were more radical extremists in the Republican Party, compared with 32 percent of those who said the same for the Democratic Party.

The poll also asked respondents for their thoughts on the current administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Just under of half of respondents, or 49 percent, said they support Biden moving forward with Democrats to pass a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package without support from Republicans.

Two in 5 respondents said the new president should cooperate with congressional Republicans to get a smaller package through.

Overall, the poll found that two-thirds of respondents approved of Biden’s handling of the pandemic thus far. 

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.”

The poll was also conducted in Spanish and English and has been 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 company added that the survey has a margin of sampling error of 4.8 percentage points and a confidence level of 95 percent for results “based on the entire sample of adults.”