David Drucker/Washington Examiner:
Impeachment spin win: Democrats killing GOP in testimony leak game
House Democrats are crushing Republicans with the use of testimony to frame the impeachment of President Trump for American voters, weaponizing selective leaks from closed-door depositions to portray a commander in chief that abused his power.
Democrats heading into Thursday’s floor vote formalizing impeachment proceedings have used favorable testimony from hand-picked witnesses to bolster allegations Trump threatened to withhold U.S. military aid from Ukraine unless Kyiv investigated political rival Joe Biden. This strategy has coincided with an uptick in public support for impeachment after deep initial skepticism, with Republicans complaining about a manipulated process and out-of-context leaks while offering little in the way of a compelling counternarrative.
…
Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat who has been listening to witnesses behind closed doors, said somewhat sympathetically that his Republican colleagues are not holding back or hanging Trump out to dry. There simply is no information for them to leak that would counter the Democrats’ message of a president that is corrupt.
“There is no counternarrative,” Lieu said. “It will be worse for Republicans.”
Geoffrey Skelley/FiveThirtyEight:
Why Beto O’Rourke’s Campaign Failed
But O’Rourke might always have struggled to attract a large enough base of support in the primary given the makeup of the Democratic electorate. As a moderate three-term congressman, he won over many suburban white voters in his Texas Senate bid, but as editor-in-chief Nate Silver wrote back in July, a base of white moderates, particularly younger ones, wasn’t enough. As you can see in the table below, only about 12 percent of 2016 Democratic primary voters fit all three descriptors — young, white, moderate — based on data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.1
WaPo:
As Warren and Buttigieg rise, the Democratic presidential race is competitive and fluid, a Washington Post-ABC News poll finds
The race for the Democratic presidential nomination is both competitive and fluid less than 100 days before the Iowa caucuses, with a stable trio of leading candidates and a fourth — Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind. — now rising above a dozen others in the low single-digits, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Democrats see former vice president Joe Biden as the strongest leader among the top candidates and also say he has the best chance of defeating President Trump. But he holds no advantage on five other attributes, including policy issues, bringing needed change and being mentally sharp. He remains atop the field, with Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) trailing, Warren within the margin of error.
Meanwhile, the poll finds significant concerns about Sanders’s fitness in the wake of his heart attack last month, with more than 4 in 10 Democrats saying he is not in good enough health to serve as president.
LOLGOP/eclectablog:
Let’s stop helping Trump lie
Our media has been trained to privilege lies, another weakness in our system Trump has hacked (but it’s helping him get impeached).
Democrats are being accused of something preposterous — good messaging.
It is obviously not true that Republicans are not trying to “weaponize” testimony and being crushed because of the their restraint. We know this because “the first remotely spinnable testimony for the GOP leaked immediately.” Instead, Republicans have no case to make and they know it.
But I wish it were true! Oh, how I love to see Democrats accused of good messaging.
…
Framing matters, whether we like it or not.
Our advantage when it comes to impeachment is that the facts are so overwhelming that they comport with the conventional media understanding of “the facts.” But with a billion dollars to burn, a system that doesn’t know how to resist bullshit and the massive powers of the presidency to sway and steal elections, we can’t count on the facts.
I prefer if you never repeat Trump — like, never ever use his words or retweet him. Never. But if you must (and everyone slips), definitely don’t repeat him first before your message.
Edward Isaac-Dovere/Atlantic:
Nobody Talks About Impeachment on the Campaign Trail
It’s strange. But it’s not an accident.
It’s not that the candidates are going easy on the president. They appear to hate Trump and everything he stands for. The most cynical view is that candidates are making a brute-force political calculation, allowing others to speak up so that they can avoid risk. But Pete Buttigieg claims at least part of what’s going on is that candidates, like everyone else, can’t quite wrap their head around everything happening. “On some level, you could say that the stakes right now, the level of crisis we’re facing, is so great that it’s almost impossible to speak to it through a traditional political process like a campaign,” Buttigieg told me in South Carolina last weekend. “In many ways, we may yet be underreacting.”
Of course, part of being a politician is giving people what they want to hear. The candidates aren’t just guessing that they shouldn’t be talking about impeachment—they have teams of advisers and internal polls and focus groups and months of personal interactions that are telling them the topic gets them nowhere, for the same reasons they didn’t talk much on the trail about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report before or after a redacted version of it was released in the spring.
Politico:
The Big Bet: The campaign in 2019 was mostly B.S.
The debates, Twitter, endless cable chatter, all those POLITICO stories: It’s possible they amount to very little.
The person with the biggest bet on this scenario is Joe Biden.
Yes, it looks for now like the party has moved leftward and is hungering for innovation and inspiration in ways that don’t look promising for a prosaic, steady-as-she-goes moderate who first came to Washington in 1972.
Biden’s bet, said Chicago-based reporter Natasha Korecki, who has spent much of the past year reporting on Iowa, is that “the primary electorate is really looking for a moderate, that the moderates are the ones who are really going to show up, the sort of older-sector of the Democratic Party, they’re the ones that are going to come to the polls and that are going to caucus.”
This is the same bet, with considerably longer odds, being waged by other moderates like Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, or Montana Gov. Steve Bullock.
The Big Bet: Bob Dylan is right again
“You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a’changin,” the poet laureate of the 1960s cultural revolutions sang (if you can call it that) in the fall of 1963, 21 years after Biden was born and 19 years before Buttigieg was.
Several candidates in the race, in their positions on expanding health care, decriminalizing illegal border crossings, providing reparations to descendants of slavery, and so on are betting that the ideological pendulum of American politics has swung left in decisive ways.
This may be the most consequential strategic divide of the Democratic race. Biden has spent most of his five decades in politics believing that the key for a successful progressive politician is to play defense — to avoid being caricatured as too liberal, to provide reassurance to voters concerned that the party has drifted ideologically and culturally away from its working-class roots.
Will Bunch/philly.com:
‘Get the emails’: Revealed memos suggest Mueller probe failed America. Can Congress fix it?
In one sense, Gates’ confirmation of Trump’s obsession with a conspiracy theory — that 33,000 of his Democratic rival’s emails had been stolen and could reveal damning information — isn’t a total shock. After all, the 2016 candidate famously blurted the quiet part out loud during a public appearance that July, when he famously said “Russia, if you’re listening …”
But in another sense, Saturday’s disclosure — part of 500 pages of previously secret documents from special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of the Trump-Russia scandal, revealed because of a dogged Freedom of Information push — was a bit shocking.
Gates’ disclosure to investigators was a key insight into the state of mind of a campaign that was willing and eager to work with electronic thieves — even with powerful foreign adversaries like Russia, if need be — to win a presidential election. Yet that critical information wasn’t revealed in Mueller’s 440-page report that was supposed to tell the American public everything we needed to know about what the president knew and when he knew it, regarding Russia’s election hacking.
A word of caution from today’s Siena swing state (WI,PA,MI,FL,NC,AZ) polls/NY Times:
One Year From Election, Trump Trails Biden but Leads Warren in Battlegrounds
Signs that the president’s advantage in the Electoral College has persisted or even increased since 2016.
Over all, 26 percent of these voters say they have a favorable view of Ms. Warren, compared with 47 percent who have an unfavorable view.
They say, by a margin of 74 percent to 24 percent, that they would prefer a more moderate Democrat nominee to a more liberal one. By a nearly identical margin, they would prefer a Democrat who promises to find common ground with Republicans over one who promises to fight for a bold progressive agenda.
Of voters who support Mr. Biden but not Ms. Warren, 52 percent agree with the statement that Ms. Warren is too far to the left for them to feel comfortable supporting her for president, while 26 percent disagree.
A word of caution about the word of caution: pre-impeachment baseline, and what’s a likely voter when everyone votes? Still, turnout alone won’t do it. Get your persuasion hats on.