Trump Impeachment Dominates American Discussion, Hardens Partisan Divides

The American public discussion of foreign policy faded to a murmur as the focus in Washington turned to the historic December 18 vote by the Democratic-majority House of Representatives to impeach President Trump. After an initial surge of bipartisan support for impeachment in late September, subsequent polling indicated that public support for impeaching President Trump largely broke along party lines. This all but ensures that the President will be swiftly acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate.
 
A HISTORIC VOTE ENDS THE STALEMATE OF CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS
 
In a dramatic string of speeches on Wednesday, Democrats overwhelmingly declared their support for impeaching the President while Republicans condemned the process as a “sham.”

In the run-up to the vote, three full Congressional committees — Intelligence, Oversight, and Foreign Affairs —  had deposed several high profile witnesses in an attempt to prove that President Trump had committed impeachable offenses. Among the more prominent of these witnesses were Ukraine ambassador Bill Taylor, Pentagon official overseeing Ukraine policy Laura Cooper, and former White House official Fiona Hill.
 
Many Democrats hailed the testimony on November 20 of Gordon Sondland, the U.S.’s ambassador to the European Union, as groundbreaking new evidence of presidential misconduct. Sondland told the committee that “everyone was in the loop” about President Trump’s demands for a Ukrainian investigation into the Biden family’s links to energy company Burisma, and that “it was no secret.” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democratic chairman of the Intelligence Committee, called Mr. Sondland’s testimony “among the most significant evidence to date.”
 
A similar dynamic was at work the following day when Fiona Hill testified about the impact of Russian interference in the 2016 election. She accused sitting Republican congressmen of “appear[ing] to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did,” while denouncing that view as “a fictional narrative that is being perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.” These remarks garnered substantial attention with Democratic Senator Kamala Harris, who called it “MUST WATCH.” MSNBC contributor Admiral James Stavridis added, "Fiona Hill is Donald Trump's worst nightmare."
 
THE SENATE LANDSCAPE
 
Yet despite months of sensational headlines, public opinion about impeachment has remained closely divided on partisan lines. As of mid-December, roughly 45 percent of voters support impeaching and removing the president while around 47 percent oppose it. Crucially, polling in several key swing states vital to Democratic hopes of regaining the White House in 2020 has swung decisively against impeachment, with nearly 51 percent of voters opposing the measure in a dozen polls conducted in battleground states like Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin.
 
Perhaps the key signal in this trend was sent on December 15 when Democratic representative Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey’s second district announced his intention to formally leave the Democratic party and, presumably, to become a Republican. This came in response to widespread opposition to impeachment in his district, which would make it politically difficult for him to vote for impeachment, while voting against impeachment would likely ensure a primary challenge within the Democratic party.
 
Now that the House has formally impeached the President, responsibility for conducting a trial will fall upon the Senate, which is held by Republicans with a 53-47 majority. In order to secure the 67 votes needed for removing President Trump from office, at least 20 Republican Senators would have to vote against their party, which few political observers deem likely.
 
WILL IMPEACHMENT MATTER IN 2020?
 
Impeachment has taken on huge importance to the political class because it is constitutional, historical and dramatic. But in the end, US voters will decide Trump's fate at the election next November and public opinion about Trump has been fairly stable since he was elected. Therefore, impeachment may simply play into people’s already polarized and hardened attitudes.
 
There are indications that the public impeachment proceedings may have actually helped Trump politically. A new Gallup poll released Wednesday morning, before the House vote, showed two things happening since House Democrats opened up a formal impeachment inquiry in October: Trump's job approval rating has gone from 39% to 45% and support for Trump's impeachment and removal has dipped from 52% to 46%.  A CNN poll this week found that 32% of Americans believe the impeachment inquiry will ultimately help Trump’s reelection bid, while 25% say it will hurt his chances and 37% think it will make no difference.
 
As Republicans kept reminding the House, there was no bipartisan support for Trump’s impeachment and it appears that Democrat hopes that the presentation of the case against Trump at public hearings would significantly turn his base against him have been dashed. According to FiveThirtyEight's weighted tracker of impeachment polling, Republicans have expressed consistent and unanimous opposition to impeachment since March of this year even as this fall's impeachment inquiry unfolded, with just 9.7% of Republicans currently supporting Trump's impeachment. The latest 2019 American Values Survey, conducted August 22 to September 15 by the Public Religion Research Institute, further found that forty-five percent of Republicans without a college degree and fifty-five percent of GOP respondents who named Fox as their primary news source — two demographics Trump relies on— say there is virtually nothing Trump could do to make them lose faith in him.
 
In addition, other things might end up being more important in 2020. “Demographic trends like the maturation of a generation of Latino voters, for instance, may start to have electoral consequences in 2020. There could be as many as six House seats in play in Texas next year. Or there may be other issues, more local in nature, that end up swaying voters. For instance, from October of 2018 to September of 2019 farm bankruptcies rose 24% and reached the highest level seen since 2011. That may undercut Trump’s rural base,” wrote Elaine Kamarck of The Brookings Institute.
 
The fact American attitudes are about Trump, his presidency and impeachment appear to be absolutely locked in may simply be a reflection of a firmly polarized electorate. “It’s remarkable in the era of Trump that even a story of this magnitude is unable to shift the fulcrum of American politics,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff, the GOP half of the NBC/WSJ poll, on the impeachment saga so far. If, as appears to be the case, a trial in the Senate is wrapped up by early 2020, impeachment may be a distant memory by November. Nevertheless, Trump’s overall political situation is much bleaker when it comes to 2020. A whopping 48 percent of the electorate says they’re certain to vote against him in 2020 — when just 37 percent said the same of Barack Obama in the Dec. 2011, according to a NBC/WSJ poll.