The Fox News impeachment poll isn’t an outlier (despite what Trump claims)
President Donald Trump wasn’t very happy when Fox News released a poll that showed that 50% of voters want to impeach and remove him from office, while 46% are opposed.
He claimed Fox’s polls are “always inaccurate” and “heavily weighted toward Dems.” But here’s what you need to know: the poll is not an outlier, and Fox News polling has been quite accurate over the past few cycles.
This isn’t the first time that Fox News has asked about impeaching and removing Trump from office. Since Democrats started their impeachment inquiry back in late September, Fox has inquired about impeaching and removing Trump three times.
In each Fox News poll from October to now, between 49% and 51% of voters said they favored impeaching and removing Trump from office. The same polls put the opposition between 43% and 46%.
Our CNN/SSRS polling over the same period showed similar results. From late September through the second half of November, 47% to 50% of Americans wanted Trump impeached and removed from office. Those opposed made up 43% to 45% of Americans.
We can also look to the average of all the polling. I looked at all the polls I could that specifically asked about impeaching and removing Trump. What we see is stability in the numbers.
The monthly averages from mid-September to mid-October, mid-October to mid-November and mid-November to mid-December all find that 47% of 48% want Trump impeached and removed from office. The same averages have opposition at between between 45% to 47%. In each month, a bare plurality were in favor of impeaching and removing Trump from office.
A more sophisticated aggregation of the polls done by FiveThirtyEight has support for impeachment at 48% and opposition at 46%.
Although there are some minor differences, the vast majority of the national polls show roughly the same thing on impeaching and removing Trump. It is a divisive issue, but the average consistently indicates that a small (and I emphasize small) plurality of the public think the President should be impeached and removed from office.
It shouldn’t be too surprising that the Fox News poll is fairly close to the average poll.
Nationally, the Fox News poll has done a good job of polling the political environment in the Trump era.
Back in 2016, their final poll had Trump losing the popular vote by 4 points. He lost it by 2 points. That’s an error of just 2 points and well within the margin of error.
Last year, their final poll gave Democrats a 7-point advantage in the race for Congress. Democrats would win that national House vote by 9 points. Again, an error of only 2 points.
Notice too that there isn’t a sign of bias nationally. One election, Fox News slightly underestimated the Republicans. The other election they slightly underestimated the Democrats.
The bottom line is that despite what Trump thinks, the Fox News poll, generally speaking, and on impeachment specifically, is likely far closer to the truth than he wants it to be.
