Just two months ago, the House impeachment and subsequent Senate acquittal of Donald Trump was the talk of Washington. Throughout the fall, GOP-aligned groups had blasted House Democrats with ads attacking their votes to impeach Trump. The conservative American Action Network had already dumped $11 million into targeting Democrats over impeachment, but by early February all those ads had been pulled, according to Politico.
Now everyone's reassessing. After a political year that featured a record-setting government shutdown, the conclusion of the Mueller investigation, and a historic impeachment vote, the coronavirus has shifted the political calculus all over again—and likely for the long haul.
“This is just going to dominate American life through Election Day,” one Democratic strategist who tracks House campaigns told Politico. This week, a Democratic super PAC said it was making its first calculated foray into messaging on the coronavirus—a $5 million digital ad buy criticizing Trump’s response to the pandemic. But for the most part, strategists in both parties are trying to figure out how to calibrate both their messaging and fundraising so as not to be seen as capitalizing on a national tragedy that is also wreaking havoc around the world.
One group of lawmakers breathing a sigh of relief in particular is freshman Democrats who flipped conservative seats blue in 2018. Republicans had tagged that bloc for special treatment after House Democrats voted to impeach Trump last fall. Now, however, that vote doesn't carry the baggage Republicans had hoped it would. In fact, Trump's supremely dismal leadership has put that vote in a whole new light, even for the Democrats who took it.
“Some of his reaction and what he says — ‘I didn’t want the people off that boat because I like the numbers where we are’ — that reminds me of the president we impeached. Because, again, it’s about thinking of the self-interest ahead of the nation," said New Jersey Rep. Tom Malinowski, a freshman Democrat who flipped a Republican-held seat in 2018.
Democrats will have plenty of chances moving forward to skewer Trump’s leadership in the critical early stages of this epidemic using his own words. In fact, Trump’s repeated assertions that the virus was “under control” when it was clearly spiraling out of control, and his persistent failure to take responsibility during the crisis will continue to compromise the position of Republican lawmakers straight through November.
