A recent Gallup poll shows that Trump is in a much more favourable position among US adults, independents, and Republicans today than Nixon was towards the last stage of the Watergate scandal.
Source: Statista, author: Niall McCarthy
Even as general public support for impeachment and removal from office remains higher than opposition to it, Republican voters appear to have firmly dug in their heels behind the President. Sensitivity to the mood of one’s constituency, including the risk that Trump’s wrath would pose in an election year, presents elected officials with a clear incentive to stand by the leader of their party. Prominent Republicans like Lindsay Graham have already demonstrated that they are willing to suffer the brief embarrassment of being confronted with contradictions between their opposition to the present inquiry and the one against Bill Clinton, as well as their previous and current stances on how foreign policy should be conducted. With political pragmatism clearly outweighing the need for at least the appearance of consistency, unless there is a major shift in the attitudes of Republican voters, GOP congressmen are bound to remain Trump’s firewall both when it comes to casting votes and doing damage control in the media.
This leaves Democrats with basically two approaches to using impeachment to win big in 2020, and they both rely on maintaining, fine-tuning, and ramping up their efforts at swaying public opinion. If they want a shot at getting the necessary twenty Republican Senators to turn on Trump, they need to get the people who put them in Congress to force them to do it. But with the aforementioned indications that the vast majority of people are unlikely to change their minds regarding the matter (although it should be remembered that such a widespread change of heart did come about in the late stages of the Watergate scandal), and barring the appearance of a Holy Grail witness, the Congressional process appears to be inching toward a defeat for impeachment in the Senate.
“Inching,” however, can be just the kind of long game that Democrats need to play to retake the White House. Even if they cannot turn enough Republicans in time for the Senate vote on impeachment, they can still draw out the process and make sure they maintain control of messaging to push GOP politicians into a very uncomfortable corner for the 2020 race. As a Democratic leadership staffer has been quoted saying, the core message to Republicans should be “Are you defending democracy or are you defending the president”? This, of course, is a question not primarily to politicians, but their constituents. It is early to tell how well Democrats can utilise the impeachment process to convince GOP voters to at least stay home on election day (Republican enthusiasm for voting in 2020 is remarkably high, providing fodder for theories that Democrats’ efforts might end up being counterproductive), but the hearings have only just moved to their public phase and will no doubt go a long way toward increasing the mindshare of the scandal at the heart of the process. With Trump being a consistently unpopular president among the general populace, it is not unreasonable to expect the publicity that the growing evidence will receive to drive enthusiasm among those who would like to see another person behind the Resolute Desk.