Every Impeachment Is a Singular Event

During his 2016 campaign, President Trump said that he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and [he] wouldn't lose voters.” This line, cited by both supporters and critics, sums up one of the prevailing legacies of Trump’s presidency: the unwavering support from his base.

President Trump has one of the most consistent job approval numbers of any modern president, never moving more than a few points week-to-week. As details of President Trump’s Ukraine scandal detailed in the whistleblower complaint came out to the public, many wondered whether Trump’s support would waver.

So far, the answer is no.

If we look specifically at public support for impeachment, we see that the evolution of public opinion around Trump is distinctly different from the two past presidents in modern history subjected to serious impeachment votes. For Nixon and Clinton, initial support for impeachment was very low when Gallup first began tracking but public opinion shifted significantly over the course of the proceedings.

Democratic support for impeaching and removing Nixon rose by 44-points over a year, while Republican support doubled over that same timeframe. Independents too moved sharply against the president resulting in a clear majority of the population (58%) supporting impeachment by the time Nixon resigned.

It is worth noting that even though Republican support for impeaching and removing President Nixon more than doubled throughout the scandal, many Republicans harbored a deep resentment towards GOP representatives who ousted Nixon. Some analysts chalk up the Democratic landslide in the 1974 midterms as both a referendum on Nixon’s misconduct and a Republican rebuke of their party’s disloyalty to the former president.

Total support for Clinton’s impeachment and removal tracked similarly. About a fifth of respondents overall supported impeachment at the beginning of June 1998. Only 5% of Democrats supported impeachment and removal, while over a third of Republicans (36%) supported this measure.  

By October 7, a day before Congress voted to begin impeachment proceedings, Republican support had grown by about 20-points and Democratic support had also increased with 15% of Democrats supporting impeaching and removing Clinton. However, while support for impeachment grew with Democrats and Independents over time, it never became a majority resulting in relatively low levels of public support (32%) for Clinton’s impeachment

President Trump is an entirely different story. Entering into the impeachment inquiry and House vote, public support for impeachment by party, across the board, has not changed.

Democratic support for impeachment has stayed constant over the past four months, hovering around 80%, while Republican support remains consistently around the 12% mark. One caveat: the polling questions are not the same, which could partially explain the differences in findings. In our partnered poll with Reuters, we ask respondents just whether Trump should be removed, while Gallup’s archived Clinton and Nixon polls ask about impeaching and removing.

Still, the way support for impeachment grew (or fell) for Nixon and Clinton is distinctly different than how public opinion is evolving during Trump’s impeachment process.

For one thing, the pace of the fact-finding mission is much quicker for Trump than it was for Nixon. The whole scandal took over a year to unfold, while the impeachment inquiry has moved to a full vote in Congress in four months.

Additionally, the media environment is extremely different. The 24-hour news cycle and the rise of cable television has helped harden people’s political views. A recent study FiveThirtyEight conducted with Ipsos found that people who watch cable news are more certain of their impeachment opinion. The certainty that cable news watchers hold makes it more likely that the new information they receive will be incorporated into their current worldviews, instead of changing where they stand on an issue.

To that point, the right and left are moving further apart, with partisan politics baked into many of the cultural, political, or commercial decisions people make.

How the rest of President Trump’s impeachment story plays out is still unknown. Though, it seems likely that more of the same is in store.