Trump Tries to Turn Impeachment to His Advantage for 2020
Recent national polls have shown weakening support for Trump’s removal from office.
(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump will be the first impeached U.S. president to seek re-election in more than 150 years, and he’s betting that voters in key swing states will view his rebuke at the hands of House Democrats as a rallying cry.
Recent national polls have shown weakening support for Trump’s removal from office, and in states including Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, data and interviews suggest the picture is even brighter for the incumbent president.
The House adopted two articles of impeachment almost entirely along partisan lines, setting up a Senate trial for early next year. There’s little sign Trump will be convicted in the Republican-controlled chamber. More important for the president is convincing voters that they should share his anger at a first term pockmarked by what he calls partisan investigations and return him to the White House in 2020.
The president fired off dozens of tweets and retweets of fellow Republicans early Thursday, blasting the impeachment and attacking Speaker Nancy Pelosi for suggesting that she would refrain from sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate until she secured changes in the rules for the trial.
In a campaign rally late Wednesday as the House voted to impeach him, Trump previewed how he’ll handle his impeachment in the coming months. He spent more than two hours extolling his administration’s achievements and said Democrats showed “deep hatred and disdain for the American voter” and would pay for it in the election.
“This lawless, partisan impeachment is a political suicide march for the Democratic party,” Trump told supporters in Battle Creek, Michigan, a Republican stronghold that helped him win the traditionally Democratic state in 2016.
Trump also enjoys a receptive audience across swaths of Wisconsin. Dawn Anderson, 60, said that she and her husband are independents who voted for Trump in 2016 and can’t wait to do it again next year.
“I’m mad,” she said in an interview outside a Woodman’s Markets grocery store in Kenosha. “He shouldn’t have to defend himself the way he is.”
About 52% of registered Wisconsin voters oppose Trump’s impeachment and removal from office, according to a Marquette University Law School poll conducted between Dec. 3 and Dec. 8. Forty percent are supportive.
‘Turned Off’
Trump won Wisconsin by some 22,000 votes in 2016, or about 0.7 percentage points -- the first time a Republican won the state since 1984. Officials in both parties think the state could be the most important battleground in the country in 2020.
In his office in Madison, Mark Jefferson, executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party, pulled out a poster-sized map of the state from beneath a pile of Trump and Mike Pence merchandise. The map showed county-level voting results from the 2016 election for both Trump and Ron Johnson, the state’s Republican U.S. senator.
Jefferson pointed out areas where Johnson enjoyed a higher margin of victory over his opponent than Trump did -- growth opportunities for the president in 2020, he said. The party tailors its message in part based on geography: rural voters may be more attracted to Trump’s unconventional approach to governing, while those in suburbs may be more interested in his policy achievements, Jefferson said.
He likened the impact of impeachment to former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s 2012 re-election campaign, which followed a failed effort to recall the Republican.
“I took my car to a mechanic here in Dane County and he was an older guy, about 70 years old, said he had never voted before in his life, but he went and voted this one time because he was so irritated with the recalls,” Jefferson said. “I think there are going to be some people who are really turned off by this.”
But Wisconsin turned bluer in 2018, when voters chose a Democratic governor, Tony Evers, to replace Walker and returned Democrat Tammy Baldwin to the Senate by a double-digit margin.
“Everything is trending toward the Democrats, whether it’s in rural Wisconsin or the sort of red suburban areas,” said Phil Shulman, a spokesman for Wisconsin Democrats. Trump “hasn’t done anything to expand his coalition. He won by the skin of his teeth in 2016. Everything had to fall the right way for him to win the state and everything did fall the right way.”
Trump’s Strategy
No other president has previously won his party’s nomination for election after being impeached. Bill Clinton was impeached during his second term. Andrew Johnson, impeached in 1868 after clashes with Republicans over reconstruction following the Civil War, lost the Democratic Party nomination to Horatio Seymour. Seymour in turn was defeated for election by Ulysses Grant.
Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 after the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment related to the burglary of Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building.
Democrats’ first article of impeachment finds that Trump abused the power of his office by withholding military assistance from Ukraine and pressuring President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. The other finds that Trump obstructed Congress by directing government officials not to testify in the impeachment inquiry or to respond to subpoenas for documents.
Trump’s strategy has been to attack his impeachment and those conducting it, rather than practically ignoring the House action as Bill Clinton did in 1998, said Jason Miller, a senior communications adviser on Trump’s 2016 campaign. Trump has had notable success pressuring and cajoling congressional Republicans to unify behind him; none of them voted for impeachment in the House.
And despite his unpopularity and the gravity of the Ukraine allegations, Trump has all but squelched a primary challenge to his re-election. That “tells us how much this has become the party of President Trump,” said Jeffrey Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
“A president that is this unpopular nationally should be ripe for a challenger,” he said.
Ad Spending
On Tuesday, Trump sent an angry, six-page letter to Pelosi, warning her the impeachment vote would backfire on Democrats and fuel his re-election bid.
“He’s a counter-puncher,” said Kelly Sadler, a spokeswoman for America First, the primary super-political action committee working on Trump’s re-election. “We’re being aggressive because we know that this is a highly partisan endeavor.”
The Republican party and allied groups have spent more than $16.4 million on television and digital ads mostly targeting 31 vulnerable congressional Democrats by portraying impeachment as a conspiracy against the president, according to figures compiled by Advertising Analytics. Democrats, by contrast, have spent just $5.7 million on their own ads, which mostly focus on issues such as lowering the cost of health care and raising wages.
Back in Wisconsin, Shulman said Democratic volunteers knocked on the doors of more than 54,000 homes in early November, focusing on people the party identified as infrequent or independent voters or persuadable Republicans. Impeachment was no more than “a whisper” in the conversations, Shulman said. Voters expressed more concern about health-care costs, jobs and Trump’s trade war with China.
(Michael Bloomberg is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)
--With assistance from Bill Allison and Justin Sink.
To contact the reporter on this story: Mario Parker in Washington at mparker22@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Joshua Gallu, Justin Blum
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