Number of Americans Who Say Trump Is Responsible For Jan. 6th Drops–Poll

The new results come as the House committee responsible for investigating the events of January 6th, 2021, is set to reveal its findings in a primetime hearing Thursday night.

The number of Americans who view former US President Donald Trump as “solely” or “mainly” responsible for the events of January 6th, 2021, has plummeted over the past year, according to a new poll released by NBC News.

When the same questions were asked in January 2021, a whopping 28% of respondents said Trump was solely responsible and 24% said he was mainly to blame. Those numbers have since shifted to 17% and 28%, respectively, according to the results released by NBC. The number of Americans who believe Trump was “not really” responsible for Jan. 6 has since increased from 29% to 35%, the poll indicates.

The House committee tasked with investigating the events of early 2021, when thousands of Donald Trump supporters descended on US Congress in opposition to what they claimed was a fraudulent presidential election result, is slated to deliver its results Thursday. In an unusual twist, the hearing is set to be broadcast at 8 PM. The timing of the broadcast reportedly reflects a desire by Democrats in Congress to reach as broad an audience as possible.

“The goal here is to construct this narrative,” according to Molly Reynolds, a Brookings Institute senior fellow, who reportedly told The Hill on Monday that Congressional Democrats want to “go through the countless depositions that they’ve taken… and figure out a way to try and convey a story to the public.”

Rep. Adam Schiff suggested as much in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, telling host Margaret Brennan that Democrats’ “goal is to present the narrative” they’ve built to a public that he said has “not seen it woven together.”

Another recent poll suggests waning interest in the House committee’s findings among a broad swath of the US population. According to a poll conducted by the University of Amherst, 52% want to learn more about the events of January 6th, and 48% believe it’s “time to move on.”

The results reportedly came down almost entirely to partisan leanings. One of the pollsters responsible for the survey, UMass political science professor Jesse Rhodes, reportedly told The Hill that “the most important thing” is that the hearing not be “perceived as a Trump versus Biden frame” but rather “a Trump versus Pence framework” so that viewers don’t perceive the Democratic-led efforts as being “as political or partisan” as it would otherwise seem.

Whether such framing will do much to sway an electorate that is now far more focused on skyrocketing inflation and other more immediate issues is yet to be seen.