Poll: Majority say Trump should be removed by Senate

A slim majority of U.S. adults said that President Trump should be removed by the Senate, a Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday found.

Slightly more than half of the adults surveyed, 51 percent, said that the upper chamber should remove Trump from office, while 46 percent said he should stay in the White House.

Like many previous polls have shown, there is a large division among party lines, as 86 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents surveyed said they think Trump should continue as president, while 85 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said he should be removed from office. 

The poll found that 38 percent of participants thought the president definitely engaged in illegal activity while in office or campaigning, while 25 percent said they thought he probably did. It also showed that 45 percent of those surveyed believed Trump had definitely done unethical things while in office, with another 26 percent saying he probably did. 

Ultimately, the impeachment issue does not appear to have affected the president’s approval rating.

Trump’s approval rating sits at 40 percent, with 58 percent of the participants disapproving of his performance. This is almost the same rating that he received in September 2019, before the impeachment inquiry was announced; the numbers at that time were 40 percent approval and 59 percent disapproval.

The Pew Research Center surveyed 12,638 adults on the center’s American Trends Panel from Jan. 6-19. The margin of error is plus or minus 1.3 percentage points. 

The Senate’s impeachment trial began this week, weeks after the House approved two articles of impeachment against Trump. 

The House charged the president with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress after an impeachment inquiry was sparked by reports that Trump asked the Ukrainian president to investigate potential 2020 opponent former Vice President Joe Biden.