Democrats willing to risk 2020 chances to impeach Trump, says poll

Most Democrats want to impeach US President Donald Trump, even if that means weakening their party's chances of winning back the White House in the 2020 election, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.

The poll, conducted on Monday and Tuesday, found that while support for impeachment remains unchanged overall among all Americans - holding at 45% since last week - it is rising among Democrats. Opposition to impeachment also dropped by 2 percentage points from last week to 39%.

Among those who identify as Democrats, 79% said Trump should be impeached, up 5 percentage points from a similar poll that ran Sept 26-30. Only 12% of Republicans and about 1 in 3 independents supported impeachment, which is mostly unchanged from last week.

Support for impeaching Trump had been rising over the past few weeks after an unidentified US intelligence official filed a whistleblower complaint accusing the president of pressuring Ukraine to ensnare Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden and his son in a corruption investigation. Biden is contesting his party's nomination to run against Republican Trump next year.

The complaint, denounced by Trump as a "witch hunt" carried out by his political enemies, has since been backed up by a second unidentified whistleblower who has more direct knowledge than the first of some of the allegations in the complaint, according to the person's lawyers.

Trump, who says he was acting out of his duty to root out corruption, also said last week that China also should investigate Biden.

According to the poll, two out of three Democrats also said that Congress should pursue impeachment, "even if that means they will need to postpone efforts to pass laws that could benefit me."

And 55% of Democrats said that their party leaders should press ahead with impeachment even "if it means a lengthy and expensive process that could weaken their chances of winning the presidency in 2020."

The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online, in English, throughout the United States. It gathered responses from 1,118 adults in the United States, including 454 who identify as Democrats and 457 who identify as Republicans. It has as credibility interval, a measure of precision, of 5 percentage points.