A new poll shows that two-thirds of American voters think Donald Trump should release his tax returns, and more than half say he hasn’t done so because he’s hiding something.
In the survey released Wednesday by Quinnipiac, 67% of voters said that Trump should make the returns public, while 24% said he shouldn’t. Predictably, the results broke down along party lines: 91 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of independents say Trump should release the returns; only 30 percent of Republicans say he should.
Fifty-two percent of voters overall said Trump hasn’t released them because he has something to hide — a view held by 85 percent of Democrats but only 10 percent of Republicans. Only 19 percent of overall voters say Trump hasn’t disclosed the returns because they’re under audit, which is what he’s claimed since the 2016 presidential campaign.
Quinnipiac points out that the number of people who want Trump to release his tax returns has remained stable over the past year at around two-thirds of the electorate. During the 2016 campaign, Trump became the first presidential candidate in modern history not to release any of his tax returns.
The same poll showed that Trump’s approval rating fell to 37 percent, down three points from the week after his Feb. 5 State of the Union address. Fifty-seven percent of respondents said they don’t like Trump’s policies, and 61 percent said they don’t like him as a person (30 percent said they do).
Trump made other IRS-related news this month with the release of his 2019 budget proposal, which requests $15 billion more for tax enforcement and collections but calls for cutting 4,000 jobs from the taxpayer services department.
The Quinnipiac poll surveyed 1,249 voters nationwide from Feb. 16 to 19.
