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Spotlight: U.S. public polls indicate high possibility of Trump impeachment
From:Xinhua  |  2019-10-11 16:05

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by Matthew Rusling

WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 (Xinhua) -- Various polls this week showed a growing number of U.S. voters surveyed favor impeaching U.S. President Donald Trump, which would enhance the possibility of removing Trump from the office, experts said.

"The public is moving in the direction of favoring Trump's removal from office. There are national polls showing majority support for that position, which increases the risk that Trump actually could be removed," Darrell West, senior fellow of U.S. research group Brookings Institution, told Xinhua.

A Fox News Poll released on Wednesday saw over half of U.S. respondents support impeachment, a sharp increase from 42 percent in July.

The poll, conducted Oct. 6-8 with a margin of sampling error of 3 percentage points, also showed 51 percent of the surveyed consider the Trump administration more corrupt than previous ones, up from September's 46 percent.

Trump slammed the poll on Thursday, saying since he announced he was running for the president, "I have NEVER had a good @FoxNews Poll."

"Whoever their Pollster is, they suck," the president tweeted. "@FoxNews doesn't deliver for US anymore."

Separately, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Tuesday showed 55 percent of the respondents think Congress should launch an impeachment investigation into Trump.

"Public opinion alone won't dictate the final vote, but if voters continue to move against Trump, at some point Republican legislators may start to see Trump as a political liability in 2020," West said.

Controversies surrounding the Trump-Zelensky conversation were revealed by an anonymous whistleblower complaint filed in August, which triggered a formal impeachment inquiry against Trump announced by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sept. 24.

The White House released a rough transcript of the call on Sept. 25, showing that Trump requested that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky cooperate with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and U.S. Attorney General William Barr to investigate the Bidens, and Zelensky pledged to Trump that his government would specifically look into Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company for which Hunter Biden once worked and which had been accused of corruption.

Facing an increasingly intense impeachment investigation, Trump reiterated that his July 25 phone call with Zelensky was a "no pressure conversation," and that the whistleblower's accounts "have been so incorrect."

According to U.S. impeachment rules, if a simple majority of House members vote in favor of impeaching a sitting president, the case moves to the Senate, where two-thirds of the votes are needed to remove the sitting president.

Republicans are largely supportive of Trump, and they hold the majority in the Senate, making it difficult to garner 67 votes for Trump's removal.

Christopher Galdieri, assistant professor of U.S. Saint Anselm College, said Trump's actions "have all made it more likely that the House will decide impeachment is warranted regardless of what the Senate does."

"It would force the issue of Trump's conduct in office and put senators on record one way or another. It would also be an embarrassment for Trump and a warning to future presidents," Galdieri said.

Clay Ramsay, a researcher at the Center for International Security Studies at the University of Maryland, said the likelihood of that House action was already over 50 percent before the shift in public opinion, "and it'll go higher now because of the shift."

Ramsay added that "no one can know for certain that the Senate would not convict, though right now, the chances are perhaps 1 in 4."

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