The Trump impeachment inquiry is underway

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Re: The Trump impeachment inquiry is underway

Postby Pedgerow » Fri Dec 20, 2019 1:34 am

So, the impeachment is happening. As a news story, it feels fairly underwhelming to me, probably because the story is unfolding exactly as was predicted months ago, and that means it will all fizzle out when the Republican-majority Senate decides not to actually remove Donald Trump from power.

Anyway, I was very surprised by Nancy Pelosi's announcement of the vote, where she death-stares the handful of people who started to clap the result. Supposedly, this is because impeaching a sitting president is not a good thing and so you shouldn't cheer it, but it just goes completely against the vibe of the House of Commons recently, where after the recent crushing election defeat for Labour, Jeremy Corbyn entered the House to sarcastic cheers from Conservative MPs.

How do Americans see this impeachment? It looks to me, from thousands of miles away, like Donald Trump could be impeached, shrug it off, and then come back and win another term as President. Only the third impeached man in American history could campaign for reelection, and he could win. Is that likely? The Republicans wouldn't have a different presidential candidate for the 2020 election, would they?
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Re: The Trump impeachment inquiry is underway

Postby KleinerKiller » Fri Dec 20, 2019 4:01 am

Trump will be let off by the Senate, then he'll spin it into proof of the Democrat witch hunt and his popularity will soar, leading to a landslide reelection. Four more years of Trump will do even more irreparable damage to the country and the world, and even if by some miracle we get a decent president after him (and the cynical side of me says he'll manage to do something next term like end the two-term limit, ban non-Republicans from running, or turn the Trump family into a blood dynasty from which the next king will be ordained), nothing can be done that will save us from the long-term aftereffects.

But I know being the third impeached president in history is going to really annoy him for a while. So we got some good hits in, at least.
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Re: The Trump impeachment inquiry is underway

Postby cmsellers » Fri Dec 20, 2019 6:57 am

KleinerKiller wrote:Four more years of Trump will do even more irreparable damage to the country and the world,

You misspelled both "eight" and "reengreatenment."

Seriously, though, it's clear that impeachment is not moving Trump's base at all. Some of them appear to genuinely believe that nothing Trump did is impeachable and his opponents know it. Others appear to recognize that his behavior is problematic, but retreat to saying that all that matters is the economy/Supreme Court/owning the libs and also that the impeachment process is a horrific violation of due process and an unconstitutional coup.

Amazingly, Trump's approval rating has gone up by 1% in FiveThirtyEight's tracker. It's not clear yet whether this is noise, or Republicans are right and the impeachment actually has backfired, very slightly. His numbers are better than they've been almost any time in his presidency, but are still remarkably steady, and at a level which is abysmal for an incumbent in an economy this good. Various polls show him beating various Democratic challengers or those challengers beating him, but always with poll numbers that exactly match his approval ratings.

Poll numbers on impeachment generally show that a majority of Americans support it, and the number who oppose is about 1% more than the number who think Trump is doing a good job.

Therefore, in a functional democracy, Trump and the GOP would be doomed. Unfortunately, that's not what we have here.

There is basically no chance that Trump wins the popular vote. But the chance he wins the Electoral College is about 50/50. The only states Democrats look likely to flip are Michigan and Arizona, all other swing states Trump won are tossups or lean GOP. The Florida GOP has successfully eviscerated the law that would re-enfranchise three million ex-felons, so Florida probably still leans red. In fact, handicappers have North Carolina more likely to vote for the Democrat than Florida, and Trump's probably favored there too.

I can see the following as a very a plausible scenario: The Democratic candidate flips Arizona, makes major inroads in several farming states where Trump's trade war is hurting (Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas, and possibly Montana) without winning any of them (on that list, only Iowa is a swing state) and red states where there are large Mormon populations (Utah, Idaho), make major inroads in Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina, and consolidate their margins in already blue states, winning the popular vote by twice the margin Hillary did in 2016 and even winning an outright majority. Meanwhile, Trump narrowly holds Michigan and even more narrowly flips Maine and Minnesota and crows about how he improved his EV margin by four and won a state Republicans haven't won since Nixon.

There is basically no chance that Republicans win the House popular vote, but in 2018, it was estimated it would take Democrats winning by about 6-7% for them to actually win the House. I'm not sure if it's quite as bad this time, given that Pennsylvania and North Carolina had their maps redrawn by court order, but it's still bad. And since the Democratic margin on the generic congressional ballot is about 6% and their margin depends on Democrats in districts that voted for Trump, it's entirely possible that the GOP retakes the House.

The Senate is anti-democratic by design, so no use complaining about that, but to take the Senate, the Democrats need to net five seats, or four seats and the presidency, unless by some miracle Doug Jones holds on in Alabama (spoiler alert: he won't). Their best five prospects are Colorado, Maine, North Carolina, Arizona, and Iowa. After that, you're getting into places like Georgia, Montana, Texas, and Kentucky (ousting Yertle would be so sweet I would be able to briefly forget that Trump was re-elected). Moreover, Gary Peters in Michigan is a really weak incumbent, and if Trump wins Minnesota (as he very well might), Tina Smith could be in trouble too.

It's not entirely outside the realm of possibility that the Democrat gets an outright majority of the popular vote for President, Democratic candidates win an outright majority of the votes cast for the House, and yet we end up with another Trump term, a GOP House, and an enlarged GOP majority in the Senate. Which has nothing to do with impeachment, but you know that the GOP will spin such a victory as a resounding rejection of attempts by Democrats to subvert The Will of The People.™
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Re: The Trump impeachment inquiry is underway

Postby Krashlia » Fri Dec 20, 2019 8:32 am

KleinerKiller wrote:Trump will be let off by the Senate, then he'll spin it into proof of the Democrat witch hunt and his popularity will soar, leading to a landslide reelection. Four more years of Trump will do even more irreparable damage to the country and the world, and even if by some miracle we get a decent president after him (and the cynical side of me says he'll manage to do something next term like end the two-term limit, ban non-Republicans from running, or turn the Trump family into a blood dynasty from which the next king will be ordained), nothing can be done that will save us from the long-term aftereffects.

But I know being the third impeached president in history is going to really annoy him for a while. So we got some good hits in, at least.


Ruth Bader Ginsburg is old and already had two encounters with cancer. If Trump wins again, then chances are that they get everything.

All because some small party of narcissists or power-mongers or activist-types, with their little agendas and refusal to see reality in front of them, couldn't get out of their own way for one damned minute.
Kinda like the "Progressive Stack" in an OWS rally, helping kill off any effective counter manuever before it gets off the ground, and breeding an entire generation of idiots who ("somehow") can't register the idea that the First Amendment does in fact protect "Hate Speech", and that decision was unanimously decided by the Supreme Court (among other things they have a difficult time with, yet inflict on everyone else).
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