American Voters Not Likely to Change Their Minds about Trump

American Voters Not Likely to Change Their Minds About Trump

This week political observers watched the first televised hearings of the impeachment investigation against U.S. President Donald Trump with interest.

Opposition party lawmakers hope the hearings will help persuade Americans that Trump should be ousted from office.

But the hearings are not likely to cause many Americans to change their minds about the president, the Associated Press reports. Voters either like him or dislike him.

News organizations are especially interested in the opinions of voters in states that will help decide the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

One of those states is Michigan. One voter there, Quincy Murphy, watched the hearing on his television at home. He said nothing he could see or hear would change his mind that Trump was unfit to be president.

“I watch it in disgust,” Murphy said. He is 45 years old. He works for a car manufacturer. In the 2016 presidential election, he voted for Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Murphy added, “I haven’t found anything to convince me that he is doing what’s best for this country.”

More than 700 kilometers away, a Trump supporter was equally strong in his belief that the hearings would have no effect on his opinion. Joe D’Ambrosio is 76-years-old. He has a job cutting people’s hair in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The television in his store was playing the hearing.

“I fully support the president,” D’Ambrosio said.

He said he talked to a lot of people who were happy with their jobs and the gains in their financial investments during Trump’s time in office. The opposition party doesn’t “want to talk about that, and I think they are going to pay a price,” he said.

Another man in the store added that he did not think that Trump had done anything illegal. The president is accused of withholding foreign aid to Ukraine, which has faced Russian aggression. Witnesses say the move was meant to pressure the Ukrainian leader. They say Trump wanted him to announce investigations into the family of one of Trump’s U.S. political competitors. Some lawmakers say the effort shows a president abusing his office, and the power of American foreign policy, for personal political gain.

The man was not convinced. “We ask countries to do things all the time,” he said.

The three men’s comments fit the findings of a recent public opinion study. It found that 79 percent of people in the president’s Republican Party oppose impeachment. In the opposition party, the democrats, 75 percent support it.

Even voters who say they do not belong to either party did not believe the hearings would help them decide how to vote in the 2020 election.

I’m Anne Ball.

Kelly Jean Kelly adapted this story for VOA Learning English from Reuters and AP reports. Mario Ritter Jr. edited it.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

disgust - n. a strong feeling of dislike for something that has a very unpleasant appearance, taste, smell

convince – v. to cause (someone) to believe that something is true