It’s nothing personal, it’s just business.
Imagine watching the hearings this week and concluding that the nation is better served by people like Trump and Sondland and Nunes and Jordan than by people like Taylor and Kent and Yovanovitch. Unfathomable.
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I’m pretty sure I’m on the record here that it’s either going to be roughly 50-50 (so like 54-46 to convict or 54-46 not to convict, somewhere in that range) or it’s going to be well past the 67 vote margin to convict. It’s not going to be like 65-35 or 66-34. I’m sure plenty of them will be happy to stab Trump in the back so to speak once they know it’s going to be the final blow to his political career.
But the nunn list, as far as I skimmed it (I saw a couple LOL names and stopped reading each one), is not a good one. I agree with you that people like Rubio will be politically expeditious when the moment arrives. You start with the swing state senators up for 2020 re-election, then you broaden it and look at other swing state senators and those with presidential ambitions (Rubio, Cruz, Sasse)… They need to be on the right side of this as the party sees it in 2024 and 2028.
Someone like Romney might do it on principle no matter what, but the list of those people is a short one. Maybe you get an old, likely retiring senator like Grassley, but the flip side of that argument is where the fuck has he been so far? Right? Seems like he’s pretty much bought in to the Trump brand of the party at this point.
Regardless, the chances of a conviction so far are pretty low.
I don’t think all five will, I think those are the five to watch. I’m not interested in betting against them voting to acquit, but for discussion purposes it’s probably like 30 or 40 to 1 that all five vote to acquit. I would put each individually at something like:
Gardner 90%
Collins 75%
Ernst 25%
McSally 25%
Tillis 10%
But obviously the outcome between the five is correlated quite a bit, so it’s not as low as that would make it seem.
With Gardner, he has a moderate image and when you ask yourself, “Can this guy get re-elected in Colorado without voting to convict?” I think the answer is no. Honestly the answer may be that he can’t get re-elected there either way because his impeachment vote will either lose him his base or everyone else.
That’s the great thing about this impeachment that we’ve discussed a bit on here but is not getting much play overall. It should be huge for Dems in the Senate.
They’re talking about a six week trial, right? Let’s say the impeachment vote in the House happens either right before Christmas or just into the new year, and the Senate trial starts in mid January. The vote is thus happening in late February or early March…
Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina will have voted. Super Tuesday is March 3. There could be a very clear front runner in the Dem primary, and if they’re polling like 10 points ahead of Trump nationally and beating him in every key state, while impeachment is polling at like 65-70% and Trump’s approval is at it’s floor around 35%, their best move to preserve power may be to get rid of him and circle the wagons around Pence.
Having been in AZ the last several years, I’d say more like 5%. It’s not like 1/20 stuff doesn’t happen, but I’d still be shocked.
Yeahhh sorry but again pure fantasy. I argue with trumpers all the time on a different app because I’m a masochist apparently and one constant is that polls in general are flat out fake news to them. Biden leading by 10 in March will mean nothing to both the public trumpers and the elected ones. One thing matters - Trump’s popularity among R voters. How do you see that ever dropping?
In before president says “claen”
Impeachment won’t be polling at 65-70 though likely ever barring something besides Ukraine. The polling is actually down from when Pelosi caved and made her speech to now even with the evidence getting worse and worse for Trump.
My personal opinion is that if this is all they have, a string of Washington bureaucrats telling a dry story about stuff we basically already know then this impeachment has no legs politically. Almost no one besides the diehard politics people and the Trump stans are even paying attention let alone being convinced it’s a big deal. (Basing that last part on my social media feed).
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Donald Trump is hiding his birth certificate because his real name is Milton vonHitler
If you have any lingering shred of optimism on where the R zeitgest is at and where it is heading, Sessions cut this unbelievably pathetic ad after Trump humiliated him for two years and in the middle of an impeachment hearing:
WAAF unless and until we defeat Trump on November 3, 2020.
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Dunno how many of the R’s are lying just because they are afraid of their voters, but Sessions means it. Trump’s only political agenda is nativism.
Yeah, the chiefsplanet guys were all 100% certain there was a Red Wave! incoming during the midterms and no polls in the world could ever convince them otherwise. Trump pulling off an improbable win due to a perfect storm has convinced them it will always be this way.
The information asymmetry is a huge problem for the Republican Party.
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From my experience they will absolutely believe and use polls when they show something that lines up with their narrative. If you point out their hypocrisy they just argue that well the polls are fake, but just fake for liberals so if a fake liberal poll shows something good for Trump then its just super extra good or something.
He has a stupid fucking explanation for everything just like a child
The last time I heard so much talk about serving “at the pleasure of the President” was during the 2007 US Attorneys scandal.
I think this episode illustrates, among other things, how much has changed since then. Basically a bunch of US Attorneys were fired for not being “loyal Bushies” and (allegedly) for resisting using their offices to advance the political agenda of the Republicans, specifically related to pursuing bogus “voter fraud” prosecutions.
It was treated as a major scandal, and ultimately led to the resignation of AG Alberto Gonzales and others. Even when Justice investigated itself its conclusions were unequivocal (“fatally flawed”, “inappropriately political”). It was treated as a really big deal that the Justice Department would be politicized in such a manner.
Trump, Barr, Pompeo: “Hold my beer.”
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https://mobile.twitter.com/Dixieann18/status/1195732350832918528
https://mobile.twitter.com/JahnkeRobin/status/1195437831742771201
that Barr video wow
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