Last week’s public hearings on impeaching President Trump apparently did little to change Americans’ minds on the matter, according to a wide-ranging new CNN poll.
The survey found that 50% of the American public still thinks Trump should be impeached and removed from office, while 43% oppose it.
But potentially more significant than that is the wide and growing gender gap revealed by the survey, says Vox.
The news website points out that 61% of American women now support impeachment, up 5 percentage points from a month ago, while 53% of men oppose it.
Despite the minimal change among other categories of voters, CNN points out that the latest figures remain historically significant, and that shrugging them off amounts to “missing the forest for the trees.”
What’s important, the network says, is this:
“A majority of the country believes the current President of the United States should be impeached and removed from office!”
Why is that so important? Because even in 1998, when Bill Clinton was impeached by a Republican-led House, the peak of public support for his impeachment and removal was just 29%.
Returning to the gender gap, Vox cites a Twitter post by former prosecutor and NBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah, who tweeted:
“When a serial abuser & criminal sits unchecked in the White House, women see the threat.”
In “today’s political environment,” impeachment polls “are never just about impeachment,” Vox says. “They’re also about how Trump, the Republicans, and the Democrats will fare in 2020.”
“If you’re a Democrat, women are effectively your base,” Kelly Dittmar, an assistant professor of political science at the Center for American Women and Politics, told Vox, which added that it’s especially true of black women, “who voted for Democrats in overwhelming majorities in 2016 and 2018.”
The new polling numbers on the gender gap, Dittmar says, “send a signal to Democrats that women in general are squarely behind impeachment,” noting that female voters outnumber men and are more likely to turn out on election day.
