I admit that Mitt Romney surprised me on this. Didn’t expect it. It’s easy to say that this is just a personal decision and it doesn’t matter. I don’t think that’s quite true. Obviously Trump will be acquitted. Almost certainly Romney will be the only Republican who votes to convict the President. But a couple days ago I noted how much Republicans gain by their unanimity. That has a profound, opinion-shaping, normalizing effect.
There’s one line that jumped out at me. Romney said about how history will record his vote that “they will note merely that I was among the senators who determined that what the president did was wrong, grievously wrong.”
A couple months ago I said that I was not surprised that Michael Bloomberg’s blanket television air war had ginned him up low single digit support. It’s sort of sad that a year of campaigning for an accomplished rising star Senator like Cory Booker couldn’t get that traction. But life isn’t fair. Running a lot of ads makes the first few points easy. There’s a decent number of floating voters. But once you get past 3% or 4% and try getting closer to 10% you need to start peeling away people with more fixed views and people who support other candidates. That’s much, much harder.
Well, I was wrong. It hasn’t been that hard.
The RCP average now has Bloomberg at 10.6% support nationally. That’s just a few percentage points behind Elizabeth Warren and rising rapidly.
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?
