Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
In terms of the impeachment outcome representing the will of the American people it appears the vote was over representing support for conviction. Though in any winner take all system like the senate you will always get distortions based on size of district California vs Montana and margin of victory. California and Mississippi vs Georgia.
So despite those voting against conviction only representing a minority of the population I don’t think you can say the will of the American people was not carried out.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/impeachment-polls/ |
Opinion polls regarding impeachment are misleading, because they don't take into account that there are various reasons why a person may have voted a certain way. In this case, it's plausible that many of the people who voted against the idea of impeachment only did so because they saw it as not worth it,
because they knew ahead of time that 2/3 of senators would be required for conviction, so conviction was impossible in this case.
In other words, if the system was not set up in such a way that made conviction impossible, it seems very likely that many more people would have supported impeachment and conviction.