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The impeachment effort is losing a little support, just as it’s reaching a climax on Wednesday.
The latest RealClearPolitics moving average of polls shows a decline in recent days in the percentage of Americans who support House Democrats’ push to impeach President Donald Trump. Some 47.1% are supportive, down a bit from a high of 49.5% on Oct. 21, a month after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry.
The average of polls also shows a modest rise in recent days in the percentage of Americans who oppose impeachment, with 48% against it. That’s a new high, but not that far above a low of 43.7% that came in early October.
“Most of the polling is pretty stable, although there has been an increase in the opposition to impeachment in this last round of polling. But again it’s still relatively a 50-50 proposition,” said Tom Bevan, the co-founder and president of RealClearPolitics, during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show yesterday.
Bevan said some polls released Monday revealed opposition to impeachment topping support for it, and that development has led the RealClearPolitics average to show for the first time that “support now is underwater.”
Don’t miss: Complete MarketWatch coverage of the Trump impeachment inquiry
And see: Here’s what’s happening next in Democrats’ effort to impeach Trump
A majority of the Democratic-led House is expected to vote Wednesday evening in favor of two articles of impeachment that charge Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Trump is on track to become only the third American president to have been impeached, but the Republican-controlled Senate is expected to acquit him in an impeachment trial next month, allowing him to remain in office. That helps explain why the stock market DJIA, +0.02% SPX, +0.07% hasn’t reacted much lately to impeachment-related developments.
Opinion: For the stock market, impeachment is just a sideshow
The impeachment effort centers on Trump’s pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch investigations into Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden and his son Hunter, as well as into a theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
