How Impeachment Votes Work Along Party Lines

Taking a look at the partisan nature of votes on impeachment articles in the U.S. Senate, it seems almost impossible for any party to ever cross the two-thirds majority of 67 votes needed to remove a president from office.

Despite the historic vote of 57 to 43 in the Senate on Saturday in favor of convicting former President Donald Trump of incitement of insurrection, the goal of a two-thirds majority was still very much missed.

The most guilty votes for an article of impeachment had previously stood at 50. Before Saturday's vote, Mitt Romney had been the only Senator ever to vote in favor of removing a president from his or her own party. In Trump's first impeachment trial in the Senate in 2020, he sided with Democrats, if only on one of the two articles in question. In the 2021 impeachment reprise, he was joined by Republican Senators Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Ben Sasse of Nebraska.

Former President Bill Clinton was acquitted in 1999 in what is the most bipartisan vote of the modern age when 45 Democrats and 10 Republicans voted in his favor on the article of perjury.

The third president to ever be impeached, Andrew Johnson, faced a smaller Senate in 1868. The Democrat had ten Republicans side with him on each of a total of three impeachment articles – resulting in a 35:19 guilty vote, which caused the rest of Republicans to narrowly miss the two-thirds majority. The ten Republicans who voted in favor of Johnson did so affirming their faith in abolition (or, as some historians have noted, possibly accepting bribes). None of them returned to the Senate. Out of the eight where historical records as to why exist, three lost reelection campaigns, while the rest resigned, did not run again or died in office.

Johnson assumed the presidency after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, to whom he was vice president. He faced eleven articles of impeachment in the House, mainly to do with his decision to replace the Secretary of War despite an act that said he needed approval from the Senate to do so.