As the impeachment story gets digested by the public (who actually agree Trump did something wrong, while arguing about the remedy), here’s a link to the MSN tracking poll highlighted above. Note that approval numbers haven’t changed even as impeachment sentiment has grown.
Matt A Barreto/WaPo:
Would Booker and Castro be in tonight’s debate if polls counted people of color accurately?
Most polls misrepresent the Democratic electorate. Here’s how that skews the results.
The DNC imposes no methodological criteria on external pollsters when it comes to racial demographics or bilingual polling. It depends on individual media companies and pollsters to “get it right.”
That leaves pollsters with two accuracy problems: surveying enough nonwhites and ensuring that sample represents the full array of people of color. They don’t. For instance, none of the qualifying polls has offered the survey in any Asian languages — even though Asian Americans are expected to make up 7 percent of Democratic voters nationally. And with Latinos making up an estimated 17 percent of Democratic voters, all qualifying polls should be available in Spanish.
And permission structure for those who are silent:
An interesting thread:
Here’s that report from Niskanen:
Will Trump Anger Motivate Black Turnout?
Phoenix: I think it’s pretty easy to see the role that anger could play in our politics, whether we’re thinking about it, mobilizing protest movements from Occupy Wall Street to the Tea Party until black lives matter. And we also see anger welling up intellectual politics from those rebutting images of people yelling at their elected officials at town halls to these kinds of angrier opportunities, like we’ve seen at Trump rallies or even the kind of anger motivating so-called Bernie Bros. And so my book finds really interesting and important racial differences in which groups are leveraging anger more towards political use.
Specifically, I’m finding that across different political areas, dating back to Reagan and continuing into the current Trump era. African Americans are expressing significantly less anger about politics, about political figures, specifically political environments broadly than their white counterparts. And in addition, anger’s having very different effects on participation. So amongst African Americans, I’m seeing anger had some mobilizing role in particular actions, some strong effects for donating to candidates, contacting elected officials.
But anger is most effectively utilized among African Americans towards protest type actions participating in protest or participating in boycotts. For white Americans across the range of political actions, electoral protest, anger tends to be more effective as stimulating action. So the effects are larger amongst white Americans and there’re larger for a broader set of action amongst white Americans. So that’s why I labeled The Anger Gap, anger being drawn upon less frequently or less intensely by African Americans and having less than effect on their political participation. So we definitely see The Anger Gap manifest in kind of electoral behaviors, whether you’re talking about voting or working for candidates, working for campaigns. And we also see that present in less anger being leveraged than we might expect towards system challenging actions.
On the corollary on the converse, I find African Americans being more mobilized towards both electoral and protest or unconventional actions by positive emotions specifically, pride and in limited context hope.
Josh Kraushaar/National Journal:
Progressive Voters Are Hopelessly Divided In 2020
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are splitting the party’s left-wing base, making it likely a more moderate candidate will prevail in the early states.
For all the accolades Warren’s campaign has received, it’s looking like it made one of the biggest strategic miscalculations of the entire race. They thought Sanders’ support would gradually peter out and migrate in their direction. So Warren decided to match Sanders’ progressive zeal, agreeing with him on government-run health care and even pivoting to his left on polarizing cultural battles.
But being in that space undermined her electability and failed to gain her much ground against him among the most liberal voters. At this week’s debate, Warren sounded a more pragmatic note on health care, saying she’d focus on reducing costs on commonly used prescription drugs instead of reiterating her support for government-run health care. Sanders did the opposite, rejecting the notion there would be any political resistance to his ambitious agenda.
That there above is what you might call a ‘gender gap’. Biden and Sanders lead Trump by 4, Warren by 2.
Hans Noel/Mischiefs of Faction:
Impeachment fits Trump's populist strategy perfectly.
Many have said that if Trump is not removed by the Senate, he will consider this vindication. But in a real way, being impeached itself is vindication. It shows that the elite does view him as a threat, and that they have not been vanquished. I don’t think Trump wants to be impeached, but he will use it.
This does not mean, necessarily, that impeachment was a tactical blunder for Democrats. Trump would have used this rhetoric regardless. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ campaign strategy will be in part to depict Trump as corrupt and authoritarian, unfit for his office. His reaction to impeachment gives them a lot of fodder for that argument. And there are principled reasons to decide to impeach.
But the impeachment does make stark the strategy Trump will use in 2020. Trump’s rhetoric is often described as airing his grievances. It’s more. He wants to make his grievances your grievances, and this is the perfect one to do that with .
Alex Samuels/Texas Tribune:
The Texas suburbs are slipping away from the GOP. These women for Trump want to win them back.
Texas Republicans need women on their side if they’re going to keep the state red in 2020, but recent polls suggest President Donald Trump’s support among women is plummeting.
The goal of the Houston gathering was two-fold: energize existing supporters and encourage them to spread the gospel of Trump campaign’s promises — lower taxes, free-market health care, less government regulation, telling off the “fake news” media, and cleaning up “the swamp that is Washington D.C. bureaucracy” — to their friends and neighbors.
“We need every one of you to replicate yourselves,” said Penny Nance, the CEO and president of Concerned Women for America, who also said she is an evangelical Christian.
“Texas has the largest group of new voters,” she continued. “So guess what? We need to get them signed up.”
But beyond the four walls of the Houston distillery, that might be easier said than done. Even Texas’ historically conservative suburbs now appear competitive: A Houston-area congressional seat flipped to Democrats in 2018, and both Harris and Fort Bend Counties are overwhelmingly blue. In the Dallas region, Republicans lost a second congressional seat last year, along with a slate of state House seats and a state Senate one.
Margaret Sullivan/WaPo:
The two big flaws of the media’s impeachment coverage — and what went right
Equating the unequal. In an unceasing effort to be seen as neutral, journalists time after time fell into the trap of presenting facts and lies as roughly equivalent and then blaming political tribalism for not seeming to know the difference.
“Too much coverage seems to have got stuck in a feedback loop,” wrote Jon Allsop in Columbia Journalism Review. “We’re telling the public that politicians aren’t budging from their partisan siloes, and vice versa, with the facts of what Trump actually did getting lost somewhere in the cycle. The cult of ‘both sides’ is integral to this dynamic, and it’s serving the impeachment story poorly.”
What went right: For Americans who were truly interested and willing to do some of the work of being informed, the facts underlying impeachment — and plenty of opinions — were readily available. They might have had to do some comparing and contrasting of news outlets and varying views, and to pay careful attention to the hearings themselves.
The broadcast networks rightly abandoned a great deal of their regular programming to air day after day of hearings. CBS Evening News, which recently moved to Washington from New York, gave its full 30-minute broadcast on Wednesday to impeachment coverage.
The four national newspapers gave the hearings voluminous coverage for weeks — and their editorial boards eventually all wrote in support or opposition. The Washington Post, USA Today and the Times all made strong cases for impeachment. By contrast, the Wall Street Journal, whose board has steadily opposed impeachment, took a swipe at the “impeachment press” and went further: “Based on the House evidence, Senators are justified in voting to acquit without hearing anyone.”
Coverage aplenty. Opinions unending.
As for plain old facts — like the ones mentioned by Carol in Battle Creek?
CJR:
Both sides
[Jay] Rosen is right that this sort of language is inadequate: Democrats, for the most part, are engaging with the factual record; Republicans, for the most part, are not. These positions are manifestly not equivalent. Treating them as such does not serve any useful concept of fairness; instead, it rebounds clearly to the advantage of the one side (Republicans) for whom nonsense being taken seriously is a victory in itself. The Times is far from the only culprit. The structure of some TV news shows, in particular, has bothsidesism hardwired into it: a Democrat and a Republican are given equal time to make their unequal impeachment cases, and both face hard questions, to contrive a sense of balance. The questions lobbed at Democrats are often fair, but often pale into triviality when a Republican follows them on and starts sowing conspiracy theories.
Some coverage, it seems, can’t even do bothsidesism properly. Yesterday, Meet the Press courted online criticism of its own, after it aired clips from a roundtable discussion on impeachment with six voters in Kent County, Michigan, a competitive area of a competitive state. Every one of the voters was a Republican; they all appeared to be white. Host Chuck Todd disclosed their partisan affiliation, but not before he’d introduced them as “voters beyond the Beltway.”
Here’s my contribution to “both sides”: