Nearly half of Americans think Donald Trump should be charged with a crime for his role in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that 48 percent of U.S. adults say the Republican former president should be charged with a crime for his role, while 31 percent say he should not be charged.
An additional 20 percent of those polled say they don’t know enough to have an opinion, while 58 percent say Trump bears a great deal or quite a bit of responsibility for what happened that day, reports the Winston-Salem Journal.
The poll found that overall, 56 percent of the public has been following the news on the January 6 hearings, including 75 percent of Democrats and 42 percent of Republicans.
As for actually watching or listening to the hearings, less than half the country watched or listened to the hearings, with Democrats more than twice as likely as Republicans to do so (58 percent vs. 27 percent).
According to the poll, opinions about the culpability for the Jan. 6 uprising have changed very little since last December and are highly partisan. Large majorities of Democrats say the rioters themselves and Trump bear a great deal of responsibility for the insurrection, while few Republicans agree.
Regardless of public opinion about Trump’s likely criminal involvement, lawmakers continue to face a stark reality: While they can investigate Jan. 6 and issue subpoenas to gather information, only the Justice Department can bring criminal charges, according to the Associated Press.
The poll of 1,053 adults was conducted June 23-27 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4 percentage points.
