Brian Kilmeade — the dark-haired guy on “Fox & Friends,” Fox News’s morning show — was surprised. During the program on Monday, a correspondent reported that a Fox News poll showed that 50 percent of voters favored impeaching and removing Donald Trump. (An additional 4 percent favored impeachment alone.) “I was stunned to see that that’s the number, because I thought that things were trending away,” said Kilmeade.

It’s tempting to think that he simply made the mistake of watching too much of his own network, but recently the idea that impeachment has been bad for the Democrats has been widespread. “Democrats’ impeachment obsession is backfiring,” The Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen crowed last month. “Indeed, it could prove to be the biggest political blunder in modern times.”

It could, but so far it hasn’t. After weeks of contentious, often exasperating hearings, most polls show backing for impeachment holding steady, with more people supporting than opposing it. Support for removing Trump from office is generally higher than was support for removing Richard Nixon in July 1974, the month before he resigned.

True, impeachment is less popular in several important swing states, which is cause for Democratic worry. And there have been a couple of polls which show it underwater with voters at large, including a recent one from Quinnipiac. But as David Graham recently wrote in The Atlantic, one underappreciated aspect of the Trump impeachment is how popular it is given the rarity and severity of the remedy. It’s certainly more popular than Trump himself.