Impeachment Trial to Pull 2020 Democrats Off Trail During Key Month
The House voted Wednesday to send articles of impeachment to the Senate, where a trial is expected to begin in January.
(Bloomberg) -- Just before the first votes are cast in the Democratic primary campaign, five candidates -- including two in the top tier -- could be yanked off the campaign trail to preside as jurors in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.
The absence of senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker and Michael Bennet from the snowy campaigns in Iowa and New Hampshire could give Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg a sharp advantage in the critical first nominating contests.
The House voted Wednesday to send articles of impeachment to the Senate, where a trial is expected to begin in January and is likely to last at least two weeks and possibly longer. That timing creates a logistical nightmare for the lawmakers caught between the imperatives of courting voters in Iowa and New Hampshire and their sworn duties to serve in the Senate trial.
Top-tier candidates Sanders and Warren are bracing to dash back and forth between Washington and early states. Klobuchar, Booker and Bennet will also have to cut back their campaigning. Some are enlisting surrogates to stand in for them in Iowa and elsewhere while they’re stuck in Washington, and considering hosting virtual town halls.
“The last place I’d think the senators running for president would want to be in the weeks before the Iowa caucuses is tethered to their desks in the senate, silently serving as jurors in an impeachment trial, the outcome of which we already know,” said David Axelrod, a former strategist for President Barack Obama.
Biden, a former vice president, and Buttigieg, whose term as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, will have ended, will be free to campaign and raise money as much as they please, which could help them solidify their already strong positions in the race. Biden is the national front-runner in most surveys and Buttigieg is leading in many Iowa polls.
“The problem is Biden and Buttigieg will have a significant advantage because they can be everywhere while the senators aren’t present,” said Howard Dean, a former Democratic National Committee chairman and a 2004 presidential contender.
“It’s all retail politics” in Iowa and New Hampshire, he said, referring to those states’ unique habits of meeting hundreds of voters individually and in small groups, sometimes in their homes. “If you don’t do the retail you really can’t win.”
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Campaigning senators will have a hard time working around the trial’s schedule. Rules require the Senate to consider the impeachment articles beginning at 1 p.m. every day except Sunday, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has told senators they should expect to be in Washington six days a week.
They can’t even use the trial to their political advantage. There will be no fiery floor speeches on national television and few other opportunities to grab the spotlight. The trial will turn the presidential candidates into passive listeners, offering no break-out visuals that can be channeled onto social media or into news programming to boost their campaigns.
‘Sitting Quietly’
“The trial doesn’t offer the limelight of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing,” said Mo Elleithee, who was senior traveling press secretary on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. “They will be sitting quietly and listening.”
And when any of the five senators go on TV, they may face more questions about the trial than pocketbook issues that are most important to voters, he said. “They’ll get asked more about the trial than their latest prescription drug plan,” Elleithee said.
Warren is planning to shuttle between Washington and Iowa or New Hampshire.
“There are some things that are more important than politics, and if we have an impeachment proceeding going on, I will be there,”she said in Rochester, New Hampshire in early December.
The Sanders campaign will look for opportunities for him to get back to early primary states on Sundays or early some mornings or evenings once the trial schedule is clear, said Nina Turner, a national co-chairwoman of the campaign and former Ohio state senator.
Sanders also will do plenty of TV and radio appearances.
“We as a campaign will be doing what we can to make sure he’s out there, front and center,” Turner said.
Using Surrogates
The Sanders campaign will lean on surrogates to lead rallies and ice cream socials. Turner will host some events, along with Carmen Yulin Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico; actor Danny Glover, Representative Ro Khanna of California, Harvard Professor Cornel West and the two founders of Vermont-based Ben and Jerry’s Homemade Inc., Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield.
While Sanders and Warren may weather the time off the trail as an inconvenience, it could spell serious trouble for Klobuchar, Booker and Bennet, all of whom are struggling to break out of single-digit polling before the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3 and the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 11.
Booker, who didn’t qualify for the Democratic debate on Thursday, is planning to campaign in the four early states, which also include South Carolina and Nevada, between Dec. 30 and Jan. 4 before the Senate returns from the holidays.
Klobuchar has said she will be turning to surrogates that include Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Bennet, who also didn’t qualify for the debate, says he will hold New Hampshire town halls remotely from Washington while his wife, Susan Daggett, campaigns for him in the Granite State and Iowa.
Elleithee said surrogates “never help as much as the candidate” — even if it’s a political star like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who occasionally campaigns for Sanders — in states like Iowa and New Hampshire, where voters “are used to hearing directly from the candidates.”
Shorter Trial
While the 1999 impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton lasted about five weeks, McConnell has been talking about a truncated process that could last as little as two weeks.
But McConnell and Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer have not yet settled on a process. That includes how long Trump and House impeachment managers get to make their cases and whether any witnesses will be called. Without an agreement on ground rules to get started, the process could stretch out.
The votes of 51 senators will be needed at some point to end the trial. Removing the president from office will require 67 votes. Democrats have 47 members in the chamber.
Schumer has warned his campaigning colleagues to embrace the proceedings. “This has to come first,” Schumer said Dec. 10. “This is one of the most solemn decisions that anyone has to make and I’ve told all members of my caucus that scheduling concerns are secondary to doing this the right way.”
(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 Joshua Green.
To contact the reporters on this story: Sahil Kapur in Washington at skapur39@bloomberg.net;Laura Litvan in Washington at llitvan@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Max Berley
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