Poll finds nearly two-thirds of Americans don’t oppose removing Trump via impeachment and conviction

That’s the bottom line figure in this USA TODAY poll, of 1,006 adults conducted Tuesday and Wednesday.

Those polled favored impeaching Trump by a 45% to 38% margin, and having the Senate remove him by a 44% to 35% margin. That these numbers are nearly identical probably indicates that very few people make any distinction at all between impeachment and removal. (Indeed the colloquial meaning of the word impeachment has always been “removal from office.”)

They also indicate that, once the impeachment process began, the set of people who disapproved of Trump but also opposed impeaching him quickly went to zero. And this of course is before a single hearing has been held, before a single Trump official has been held in contempt for refusing to appear at an impeachment hearing, etc.

Trump is a historically unpopular president (his approval ceiling is drastically lower than that of any of his predecessors since approval polling began 70 years ago), and removing him via impeachment is something that hardly more than a third of the population actively opposes, even at this very early stage in the proceedings.

And as for those Americans who remain undecided on the matter, early returns suggest that Trump’s unhinged reaction to even the possibility of impeachment is likely to make most of them sympathetic to taking this supposedly “radical” step, which is already supported by a vastly larger percentage of the electorate than that which bothered to vote for Trump in the first place (Trump got 46% of the 57% of eligible voters who voted for president, which means that barely a quarter of eligible voters actually voted for him. If we consider the American population as a whole, that figure drops to a heart-warming 19.5%. I believe the children are the future).