The public phase of the House impeachment hearings starts Wednesday, and everyone thinks they know how this story will end. The question is whether there will be a plot twist that has little to do with Ukraine, “perfect” phone calls or the Biden family. If so, it will be told far from Washington, D.C., many months from now.
The immediate unfolding is indeed predictable: The Democratic-dominated House will impeach President Trump and the Republican-dominated Senate will not remove him from office. If there’s a twist, it’s going to come in the battleground states that will decide the 2020 presidential election. Will anyone be energized or angered by what’s about to happen?
That can be answered in part by what Democrats heard after knocking on 54,000 doors of Democratic-leaning and inconsistent voters last weekend in Wisconsin, which Trump won by 22,748 votes in 2016 — less than one percentage point.
“Impeachment wasn’t the first thing they wanted to talk about, impeachment wasn’t the second thing they wanted to talk about, impeachment wasn’t the third thing they wanted to talk about,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told The Chronicle. “Impeachment feels far away right now to many people, something that is happening in Washington, D.C.”
What does feel close at hand, say Wikler and other Democrats in swing states, is the price of health care and prescription drugs. Many voters in America’s Dairyland are more concerned about the fallout from the trade wars. Cheese shipments from Wisconsin to China have fallen almost 65% this year. Over the last couple of years, dairy farms — most of them smaller, family-run operations — have closed at a rate of more than two a day, imperiling one of Wisconsin’s major industries.
That would suggest it’s to Democrats’ benefit to get impeachment over with and concentrate on what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi zeroed in on in the 2018 midterms: economic issues like health care.
Nevertheless, voters are keeping one eye on impeachment. A Marquette Law School Poll survey of registered Wisconsin voters last month found that 46% thought there was enough reason for Congress to hold impeachment hearings, up from 29% in April.
But barring a surprise ending, the next few months of impeachment theater aren’t going to send voter enthusiasm into overdrive. It’s already there. Enthusiasm in Wisconsin is already at a point where it would typically be a few months ahead of election day, said Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll.
“We’re eight months ahead of where we are in the cycle” in terms of people paying attention to the election, Franklin said. However, he said, “I did not see evidence of either side being more energized at this point. Both parties are in a high state of engagement.”
Matt Morrison is hearing similar things in Pennsylvania, Michigan and other states where the organization he leads, Working America, has visited 2.1 million homes and talked with 766,000 working-class voters in battleground regions since Trump took office.
The possibility of impeachment draws predictable responses there, too, Morrison said.
Democratic-leaning voters fume that “it’s about time,” Republican partisans huff that “it’s an unfair attack on our president,” and “voters in the movable middle say, ‘Meh. Why is this different? It looks like more partisan bickering from Washington that ignores people like me,’” Morrison said. “These are smart people. They just don’t think that they will be affected by it.”
Their engagement level for the presidential election will be more influenced by what’s happening to fix the “crumbling infrastructure in their community or whether they still have to boil water so they can have clean drinking water,” Morrison said.
Republicans are trying to turn impeachment against the Democrats, arguing to their base that it’s an effort to undo the 2016 election.
House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield points to a survey of voters in 95 battleground House districts — that he commissioned — showing that 55% of voters surveyed said it would be better to wait for the 2020 election than move ahead with impeachment.
Other Republicans, like former Sacramento Rep. Doug Ose, are trying to show that “these Democrats ran on the promise they would get things done in D.C., but now they’ve joined Nancy Pelosi’s baseless impeachment witch hunt.”
To the extent they do run on impeachment in 2020, Democrats will try to tie Trump’s personal conduct to his indifference to working-class voters, activists said.
“The through-line here is that Trump has been ineffective because he’s only ever looking out for his own interests while working people pay the price,” said David Bergstein, director of battleground state communications for the Democratic National Committee. “That is a very powerful argument with independent voter and voters in battleground states.”
Some liberal activists are planning to use impeachment to pressure Republican senators who are up for re-election in states where a majority of voters disapprove of Trump — including North Carolina, Arizona, Iowa, Colorado and Maine. Over the past few weeks, activists with Indivisible, the nationwide grassroots movement that sprang up after Trump’s election, have made 400,000 calls to senators in those states “urging them to stand up on impeachment.”
Even if Trump is not removed from office, some progressive activists will be happy that at least the Democratic Party held him accountable, said Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of Indivisible.
“For the first two years (of his presidency) Trump got away with any number of shocking abuses of the government and nothing was done about it,” Greenberg said. “So from what I hear from activists, there’s a sense of satisfaction that Democrats are actually taking action and they are moving to hold the president accountable.”
Unless something changes, that feeling of satisfaction may be all that Democrats ultimately have to show for the impeachment inquiry.
Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli
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Impeachment is one thing. But 2020 will be about something else - San Francisco Chronicle
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