Impeachment Takes ‘Oxygen Out of the Room’ for 2020 Democrats
Impeachment Takes ‘Oxygen Out of the Room’ for 2020 Democrats
(Bloomberg) -- The impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump has roiled the long-held plans of the Democrats who hope to replace him, stealing their most precious commodity: time to make their case.
The investigation into Trump’s pressuring of the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden is crowding out campaigns on cable news and social media, wreaking havoc on their messaging and hurting lower-tier candidates’ chances of breaking out.
The drama is building with the approach of a Oct. 15 debate in the key state of Ohio, with another debate coming in November.
The impeachment inquiry “takes the oxygen out of the room,” said Joshua Darr, a professor of political communication at Louisiana State University. “There is less time available for candidates who may not want to make that the central part of their message or who are trying to have their moment.”
Darr says that will hurt candidates because media attention has become such a critical way to build name recognition, move up in the polls and circumvent party insiders who favor a rival.
That was especially true of Trump, an outsider who used billions of dollars’ worth of free advertising from interviews and rallies to win the Republican nomination in 2016.
And the issue is going to remain dominant until at least just before the first Democratic nominating contest in February. That’s if Congress sticks to its plan to wrap up the impeachment inquiry by Thanksgiving and have a full House vote before the end of December.
If the vote is to impeach, a Senate trial would likely follow in early 2020.
Experts on social media say the subject is already dominating the online conversation, making it hard for Democratic contenders to draw attention to their campaign pitches.
Craig Leonard, chief executive officer of Eyesover Technologies Inc., a research firm that tracks social-media trends, said that online discussion about impeachment is about five times higher than subjects like health care, immigration or climate change have been at their peak.
“Impeachment has drowned out pretty much any other policy discussion taking place,” he said. “It’s still out there, but it’s not being heard.”
It’s also become the most-discussed topic for all of the top Democratic candidates except Beto O’Rourke, who is still generating mostly negative discussion for his demand for a mandatory government buyback for assault weapons.
But Leonard said none of the Democrats seem to be benefiting from it.
Recent polls appear to back that up. Biden and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren continue to be locked in a tight battle for the top spot, followed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, with the rest of the field in mostly single digits. Though Warren has moved up in some recent polls, that’s a continuation of a trend that began before the inquiry and it’s not clear that impeachment talk has been a factor in it.
That could still change. Warren and Biden have taken vastly different approaches to the issue. She was the first major candidate to call for Trump’s impeachment, just one day after the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report in April. Biden has said that House Democrats should proceed with impeachment only if Trump stonewalls the investigation.
For now, Biden’s fellow Democrats are avoiding criticism of his handling of the rapidly unfolding drama -- sort of.
Reporters attending a presidential candidate gun-control forum in Las Vegas on Wednesday only wanted to talk impeachment and Biden.
Pete Buttigieg declined to weigh in when asked whether it was appropriate for Biden’s son to serve on the board of a foreign company, calling it a “shiny object” thrown out by Trump to distract from his abuses of power.
“Playing that game is playing the president’s game and the moment you’re playing it, even when you’re winning you’re losing,” he said.
Some presidential campaign veterans say that Biden’s low profile during the impeachment inquiry is a missed opportunity.
Zac Moffatt, a Republican strategist who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, says impeachment is a classic crisis moment, a chance to show the public how a candidate will respond to an unforeseen problem in real time. While the safest move might seem to be laying low, he argues that candidates need to make this a defining moment, especially Biden.
“There are a lot of clues from how campaigns behave in these moments of crisis,” he said. “Hesitancy will not serve him well in the long run.”
Biden has persisted in one message: This has everything to do with Trump and nothing to do with him. He has also tried unsuccessfully to get attention on issues like health care and education, and largely avoided speaking to reporters.
But Nicole Rodrigues, a public relations executive who works on political advocacy, said there’s also a risk for candidates who jump in too soon, especially Senators Warren, Sanders, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bennet, who may be called on to vote on articles of impeachment at a Senate trial.
“There’s huge opportunities for this to backfire,” she said.
Democratic candidate Julian Castro said Trump is “trying to use the same playbook against Joe Biden as he used against Hillary Clinton,” and that Democrats shouldn’t allow him to succeed.
“I have policy disagreements with the vice president on immigration, on health care, on a number of other things,” he said. “I would rather that we focus on those policy disagreements instead of letting Donald Trump come in and scramble the Democratic primary by using this smear technique.”
--With assistance from Sahil Kapur.
To contact the reporter on this story: Ryan Teague Beckwith in New York at rbeckwith3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, John Harney
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