Trump's odds of staying in office: The Day 6 Impeach-O-Meter for November 15th
The House of Representatives' impeachment inquiry has gone public. Will that move the needle?
When Donald Trump generates headlines, Day 6 fires up the "Impeach-O-Meter," inviting political experts to estimate the odds that Donald Trump will be impeached by the House of Representatives.
These are, of course, subjective and hypothetical scores and the impeachment process is complex and dependent on many factors.
This week, the U.S. House of Representatives began public hearings for the impeachment inquiry into U.S. President Donald Trump.
For the first time, people around the world got to watch the investigation into Donald Trump's phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — the call that's at the centre of the impeachment investigation — live and direct.
They heard from three high-level current and former officials with first-hand knowledge of the Trump administration's dealings with Ukraine.
So we're firing-up the Day 6 Impeach-O-Meter for another reading.
Every few weeks, we ask a political expert to weigh in on the odds that Donald Trump will be impeached by the House of Representatives, from one — meaning totally safe in the White House — to 100, meaning impeachment is imminent.
When we last checked on Nov. 1, Roll Call columnist Mary C. Curtis raised the Impeach-O-Meter reading to 95 per cent.
This week, we asked Salon senior political writer Amanda Marcotte to give us her reading.
Here's part of what she told Day 6:
I think this week's hearings on Capitol Hill do bring us a lot closer to Donald Trump being impeached. Not only did we see the strength of the evidence against him, but also the very lack of any decent defence from the Republicans.
I know there was some concern that having the hearings televised live might not work as well as it did, perhaps, in Watergate, because American audiences now expect a little more razzle dazzle than they did back in the 1970s. But I also think it was undeniable that Wednesday's hearings really exposed how much drama there still is.
What we're seeing is more people stepping forward, more evidence emerging, and more importantly, it doesn't really seem to me that the Republicans have anything resembling a good defense of Trump. And while the Democrats are still holding up the pretense that it's possible that they might not impeach him, I just don't see it ending in any other way.
So, where does Amanda Marcotte place the odds of a Donald Trump impeachment this week?
"99 per cent," she said.
That marks an increase of 4 points over the previous reading.
We'll continue to track the numbers in the weeks to come, and you can follow along here.
Editor's note: When we started the Impeach-O-Meter, we settled on getting people who watch U.S. politics closely to estimate the odds that Donald Trump's presidency would "end in impeachment." We've come to realize that it wasn't always clear whether that meant that the U.S. House of Representatives would vote to impeach him or that additionally, the U.S. Senate would vote to remove him from office as a result of being impeached by the House of Representatives.
We've always intended that to mean being impeached by the House of Representatives, so for the sake of clarity, we've changed the language to "the odds that Donald Trump will be impeached by the House of Representatives."
To hear Amanda Marcotte give her Impeach-O-Meter prediction, download our podcast or click Listen above.