Table Of Contents
‘Joke’
Patti Martin, 45, lives in California and claims no party, saying she finds Democrats and Republicans equally abhorrent. She voted for Mr. Trump.
“I think it’s a waste of time and money. I think there’s a lot more going on — like the pandemic, for one, job loss, for two. And I think we need to focus our energies on being more positive and how we can get people back to work so they don’t lose their livelihoods. I know somebody said the president had incited it, and I’m just like, ‘Please, I don’t believe that at all.’ At the end of the day, people are going to do what they’re going to do. These are grown people. They have to be responsible.”
‘Unsurprising’
William Hogan, 36, is an independent voter in Atlanta and a marketing director for a long-term care pharmacy company. He figures Congress has more important matters to focus on than impeaching and trying a president who has already left office.
“I’m glad that he’s no longer president, but to me this feels like a waste of time. I certainly think he has some significant responsibility for what happened. But this impeachment is more kind of showmanship to me, and I think that’s a shame because there’s a lot that needs to get done. But it is what it is, and since they are going through with it, I wouldn’t mind seeing him convicted.”
‘Pointless’
Sam Riddle, 50, is an operations manager for a construction equipment company and a Trump voter from Charleston, W.Va. He said he believed that Mr. Trump was not to blame for the insurrection, and that he was more interested in following President Biden’s trade and stimulus policies than impeachment.
“I did not spend a lot of time on that first one, and I’ll spend even less time than that on the second one. It’s not a concern to me. I want to see the news as to seeing what Biden’s plans are now that he is the sitting president. Now, let’s press forward. Let’s try to save our country.”
Methodology: We obtained a list of more than 1,000 people last year who had responded to a SurveyMonkey online survey and said they were voters and were willing to be interviewed by a reporter. We reached out last year to several hundred of those voters — covering a wide range of ages, races and ethnicities, political leanings and home states. This article includes interviews conducted this month with some of the people from that list plus three who had been interviewed on impeachment for a different article. The interviews do not constitute a scientific sampling of opinion.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.