The poll once again also asked respondents about their views on a potential impeachment of President Biden by the House GOP.
“Since Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, a number of prominent Republican elected officials and conservative media personalities have proposed that if the GOP took control of the House of Representatives they should seek to impeach the president,” Nteta says, “As our polling shows, momentum for the impeachment of Biden increased in 2021, as a growing number of Americans not only thought that the GOP controlled House would impeach Biden, but that he should be impeached. With Republicans underperforming in the 2022 midterms, Republicans holding a slim majority in the House and questions concerning the political vulnerability of President Biden subsiding, we have seen a decrease in both the expectation and desire that Biden will be impeached.”
Among all respondents, expectations that Biden will be impeached have fallen from 44% in a May 2022 UMass Amherst Poll to 38% in the latest poll. Meanwhile, those who say Biden should be impeached has increased from 34% in May to 40% in the current poll.
“Hunter Biden is going to be in the news a lot and many Americans believe the president is linked inextricably to accusations against his son’s business dealings,” La Raja says. “Among the 40% of voters who think Biden should be impeached, the most common reason they tell us, according to our word cloud, is related to Hunter Biden and his business affairs in Ukraine years ago. The desire to impeach Biden is strictly along partisan lines – 72% of Republican voters think he should be impeached compared to 15% of Democrats and 37% of Independents. These figures have not budged in more than a year.”
“The Constitution stipulates that the president should be impeached if they commit treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” Nteta explains. “While we have seen a decrease in the number of Americans who believe that President Joe Biden should be impeached, many among those who continue to believe that President Biden should be impeached point to the alleged criminal business dealings of his son Hunter Biden, his withdrawal from Afghanistan, the immigration crisis on the southern border and the president’s age and mental acuity as the central reasons why Biden should be impeached. Whether these supposed offenses rise to the level of impeachable offenses remains to be seen but given the slim majority enjoyed by the GOP it is unlikely that we will see Articles of Impeachment approved by the House of Representatives.”
Confidence in the Integrity of the 2022 Midterm Elections
“Across demographic groups, a majority of Americans express confidence in the legitimacy of the 2022 electoral results,” Nteta says about the latest poll’s findings, which found that 56% of those surveyed were confident that the midterm elections were fair and accurate. “However, given the continued popularity of the ‘Big Lie’ and the presence of a number of Republican candidates, such as Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who denied the legitimacy of the 2022 midterm electoral results, it is no surprise that Republicans, conservatives and Trump voters question the fairness and accuracy of the 2022 midterm election. The true test of whether false claims regarding the legitimacy of the nation’s elections will come in 2024 when Trump will likely make electoral integrity and voter fraud a key part of his presidential campaign.”
Meanwhile, La Raja points to results in the poll regarding whether state legislatures should have the power to overturn elections.
“Some Republicans have been circulating a constitutional theory that legislatures have authority to change the results of an election if they believe there were problems,” he says. “More than one in four Americans are unsure about this argument. However, a majority of Americans (53%) oppose – and 40% are strongly opposed to – making it easier for state legislatures to change election results if they believe there were problems. The largest set of supporters for this theory are Republican and conservative voters who likely think elections are full of shenanigans by the Democrats, so they want the legislature to step in. This is a dangerous theory of elections and will undermine democracy if Republican politicians try to pull it off.”
“Opposition to this plan is seen across demographic groups and unlike a number of other hot button issues, Democrats and Republicans both express trepidation about granting this new power to state legislatures,” Nteta adds. “On this issue, the public looks to have spoken in one voice, and it is still left to be seen if the Supreme Court will again contradict the public sentiment.”
Methodology
This University of Massachusetts Amherst Poll of 1,000 respondents nationwide was conducted by YouGov Jan. 5-9. YouGov interviewed 1,051 total respondents who were then matched down to a sample of 1,000 to produce the final dataset. The respondents were matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, race and education. The sampling frame is a politically representative “modeled frame” of U.S. adults, based upon the American Community Survey (ACS) public use microdata file, public voter file records, the 2020 Current Population Survey (CPS) Voting and Registration supplements, the 2020 National Election Pool (NEP) exit poll and the 2020 CES surveys, including demographics and 2020 presidential vote.
The matched cases were weighted to the sampling frame using propensity scores. The matched cases and the frame were combined and a logistic regression was estimated for inclusion in the frame. The propensity score function included age, gender, race/ethnicity, years of education and region. The propensity scores were grouped into deciles of the estimated propensity score in the frame and post-stratified according to these deciles.
The weights were then post-stratified on 2020 presidential vote choice, and then post-stratified on the variables of gender, age (4-categories), race (4-categories) and education (4-categories) to produce the final weight.
The margin of error within this poll is 3.55%.
Topline results and crosstabs for the poll can be found at www.umass.edu/poll