Political scientist and statistician Andrew Gelman has more on the ‘differential response’ issue we discussed yesterday and whether it accounts for some of President Trump’s recent slope up in the polls.
President Trump will be acquitted today. We can’t talk around that fact.
But that doesn’t mean that the conduct that put him in this pinch in the first place will be swept under the rug. House Judiciary Committee Chair and impeachment manager Jerry Nadler (D-NY) reassured reporters this morning that it is “likely” his committee will issue that subpoena that former National Security Adviser John Bolton has been begging for for weeks.
JoinRepublicans, unsurprisingly, are whipping up an outrage and grievance fest over Nancy Pelosi’s ripping up her copy of his speech. I’m actually curious whether she didn’t do this before and it simply went unnoticed. Regardless, Democrats need to lean into this. The economy may have underlying problems. But on the headline items people see, the economy is strong. It was strong in 2018 when the Democrats made a massive showing and took over the House. The election is about Trump and whether he is fit to be President. Anything short of consistently making clear that he is unfit and you’re lost.
That was not an easy speech to watch. But as political strategy it was clear cut. It was likely effective for that strategy. The White House sees 2020 as a base election and seems relatively unconcerned with expanding its political coalition. The plan is to electrify his existing coalition and perhaps grab some undecideds with an image of a proud, traditionalist nation surrounded by foes. Guns, Rush Limbaugh, ending the horror of abortion, immigrant murderers – all the touchstones of Trumpism.
What did you think?
Tierney Sneed and I (but, mostly Tierney) have been keeping close tabs on the main excuses Republican senators are offering President Trump to justify their ultimate acquittal votes, which will become concrete at 4:00 p.m. ET Wednesday.
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As I noted below, President Trump’s rising poll numbers have my attention. They are worrisome. But there’s been another critique floating around since last night and that is that it’s a bad sign for Democrats that turnout at the Iowa caucuses was just on par with 2016 rather than the high numbers from 2008. (The Post’s Karen Tumulty makes the argument here.) I don’t have to remind you 2008 turned out better than 2016. But I’m pretty confident that this conventional wisdom is wrong. Normal turnout in Iowa is just fine in terms of what it might say about November. Here’s why.
If you follow polling you know that over the last couple weeks President Trump’s approval numbers have been trending up. The differences are small. But even small differences measured in aggregate make a difference. If the President is at 43% approval on election day and gets near around that number he’s defeated. If it’s 46% or 47% victory is possible and even likely. Small differences over time count.
538’s composite average has notched up a couple points over the second half of January and this morning Gallup released the highest approval rating of Trump’s presidency: 49%.
Why is this happening?
I wanted to share TPM Reader RB’s more positive take on the Iowa Caucus, if not this particular execution of it. And that prompts me to add this slight qualification of my condemnation. These are great participatory civic exercises. You can see that watching them. They’re just not substitutes for elections. That may be a sort of impossible answer since if they don’t “count” people wouldn’t participate in the same way. But both can be true. We have expectations of elections. And the key one is that everyone gets a voice, an equal voice, at least on the foundational act of voting. Not just everyone in the sense of people who can’t necessarily spend a whole evening out doing this — covering differences in class, having children, working night jobs. That also means people who simply do not want to publicly announce their political beliefs or get hassled by neighbors or strangers about changing their votes.
With that, TPM Reader RB …
JoinIowa shouldn’t matter. It’s a small state that looks very different from the national Democratic electorate. In 2016 it voted Republican. This state’s outsized impact on the presidential nominating process rests somewhere between absurd and scandalous. But this debacle tonight is difficult to process.