Something we heard repeatedly at the focus group we did with undecided voters on impeachment is that whether they support Trump or hate him, they loathe how "negative" all this is, how both sides just shout at each other.
It makes them tune out. Who needs it?
It makes them tune out. Who needs it?
In that way, the Republican strategy is working great. If you can make this a war, if you can make it partisan and angry and vicious and impossible to parse, you can drive everyone who hasn't already made up their minds away from the process.
If you're watching the proceedings today, try to imagine turning them on with an open mind but little preexisting information. How would you make sense of any of it? Who would you believe? What would make you keep watching?
When all you want to do is protect the status quo, turning people off from the process works just fine.
One of the more frustrating dynamics in politics is many voters assume that if something was good or obvious, it'd be bipartisan, and if it's not, that means something is wrong. (The book Stealth Democracy is very, very good on this.)
Something like impeachment presents an unsolvable problem. For undecided voters to break en masse towards it, it'd need to be bipartisan and unifying. But it is, by nature, polarizing and divisive, which turns undecided voters off.
We'll have audio from that focus group on this week's Impeachment, Explained, btw. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/imp…
