Polling on Impeachment – Part 1

Impeachment Legacy blog posts Polls in the News President Bush

At a town hall meeting in San Francisco on Monday, according to a report in the LA Times, Democratic Minority Leader. Nancy Pelosi had to shout "to be heard above the boos and catcalls" when she "rejected calls for President Bush’s impeachment."  Last week, Elizabeth Holtzman, a former member of Congress who served on the House Judiciary Committee when it took up articles of impeachment against President Nixon, authored a cover story in The Nation that makes a detailed case for Bush’s impeachment of President Bush.  Near the end of her piece, Holtzman included this passage:

Organizations like AfterDowningStreet.org and ImpeachPac.org, actively working on a campaign for impeachment, are able to draw on a remarkably solid base of public support. A Zogby poll taken in November–before the wiretap scandal–showed more than 50 percent of those questioned favored impeachment of President Bush if he lied about the war in Iraq [emphasis added]. 

Daunting though it may be, MP hopes to avoid the debate about the merits of impeaching Bush to focus narrowly on what polls can tell us about the "base of support" for impeachment.  This issue actually raises a number of questions appropriate for this forum:  What is the best way to ask about attitudes regarding impeachment?  What standards should "mainstream" media pollsters use to determine what questions to include in their polls?  Just how many Americans really want to impeach Bush?   How do attitudes about impeachment and Bush now compare to attitudes about impeachment and Bill Clinton in 1998?

I will not try to address all of these questions in one post (though I hope to come back to this thread a few times over the next week or so).  Today I want to start by looking closely at the polling question that Holtzman cited, first asked by pollster John Zogby.  While it does indicate considerable discontent with the President, I believe it falls short as measure of the "base of support" for impeachment.

Here’s the background.  Back in June 2005, pollster John Zogby included the following question on a national survey of "likely voters"

Do you agree or disagree that if President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment?

The Zogby survey found that 42% agreed and 55% disagreed.  He discussed the results on Keith Olbermann’s "Countdown" on MSNBC and a few days later the "Politics" column in the Sunday Washington Post picked up the results.  A subsequent blog item by the Post’s Dan Froomkin wondered why "only three mainstream outlets" had made "even cursory mention" of the result. 

Several web sites – particularly the sites AfterDowningStreet.org and Democrats.com (an independent group not to be confused with the official Democratic Party site, Democrats.org) – started an ongoing campaign to bombard various media pollsters, reporters and editors with emails "demanding more polls on impeachment" (yet another topic for a future post). In September, the site AfterDowningStreet.org set about raising money to run their own questions on various "omnibus" polls.   They placed the Zogby impeachment question on a poll by IPSOS public affairs in early October (changing only the words "though impeachment" to "by impeaching him").  They also paid Zogby to track his original question again on a survey in early November.  The results were essentially consistent:  On the Ipsos survey, 50% agreed and 44% disagreed.  On the Zogby update in October, 53% agreed and 42% disagreed.

Just last week, AfterDowningStreet commissioned yet another question on a Zogby poll, this one focused on the NSA wiretap controversy:

If President Bush wiretapped American citizens without the approval of a judge, do you agree or disagree that Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment.

The results were consistent with the previous versions of the Zogby impeachment question.  52% agreed, 43% disagree and 6% were not sure or declined to answer. 

Now I’ll cut to the chase.  I am not a fan of the Zogby impeachment questions, largely because they tells us very little about what Americans think right now about the merits of impeaching President Bush or removing him from office.  I am also dubious about their value in projecting how Americans might react if the issue were widely debated. 

My skepticism is rooted in the complex nature of the impeachment process.  As we all should have learned in High School civics, impeachment is a process of bringing charges analogous to a criminal indictment that is initiated in the House of Representatives.  Once a president is "impeached," a trial is held in the Senate.  If a two-thirds majority of Senators votes to convict, the process removes the President from office.

The details of this process are hazy for many Americans.  Late in 1998, as the House was about to vote on whether to impeach President Clinton, CBS News twice asked Americans about the meaning of the term impeachment:

As far as you know, if the full US House of Representatives eventually votes to impeach President Clinton, does that automatically mean that President Clinton will be removed from office, or not?

In October 1998 (on a poll conducted jointly with the New York Times), only 46% offered the correct "no" "yes" answer, while more than half either said yes (33%) or were unsure.  Two months later on the eve of the impeachment vote CBS obtained roughly the same result – 54% said no, 30% yes and 16% unsure.

Given this confusion, a pollster should not just throw out the term "impeachment" and assume that all respondents understand.  Rather the pollster should word the question to provide clear meaning of the term so that it is easy to understand and interpret, both for the respondents and those of us who use the data.  Unfortunately, rather than clarifying the meaning of "impeachment," the Zogby question makes it even more vague: "Should Congress consider holding him accountable through impeachment?" 

What does that mean?  Is the question asking whether Congress should remove Bush from office, begin the process of removing him from office or just "consider" doing so?   Do respondents hear this as a question about the formal process of impeachment or just about "holding him accountable?" If the meaning of the question is unclear to us, it was certainly unclear to the respondents.  So how do we interpret the results? 

Yes, the results do indicate considerable discontent with the president and, as John Zogby himself put it, "just how badly divided this country is over the war."  However, we have many other poll measures on that score.  The most recent ABC/Washington Post poll, for example, found that 39% strongly disapprove of Bush’s performance and 43% strongly believe the Iraq War was not worth fighting.  Recent polls by CBS, Time Magazine and Fox News put the number of Americans who believe intentionally or deliberately "misled" the country in making the case for war at somewhere between 44% and 52%.   But discontent is not the same as favoring impeachment or an early removal from office.  If the Zogby question cannot help us distinguish between the two, it is not very useful.

Consider the result of another impeachment question paid for by AfterDowingStreet.org and placed on an automated poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports in October.  To the credit of Rasmussen and the sponsors, this question was much more clear and direct:  "Should President Bush be impeached and removed from office?"  Nearly a third (32%) said yes, 56% no and 12% were not sure.

So how does that 32% result compare to similar questions asked about previous Presidents.  And what about the "if" clause in the Zogby question ("if President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq")?  Does that give it value in projecting what public opinion might be in the future?  I’ll take up those questions in subsequent posts. 

Mark Blumenthal

Mark Blumenthal is political pollster with deep and varied experience across survey research, campaigns, and media. The original "Mystery Pollster" and co-creator of Pollster.com, he explains complex concepts to a multitude of audiences and how data informs politics and decision-making. A researcher and consultant who crafts effective questions and identifies innovative solutions to deliver results. An award winning political journalist who brings insights and crafts compelling narratives from chaotic data.