Independents are the key to Trump's impeachment fallout

It sounds simple, sure, but the marginal groups are the ones who decide electoral fates

Donald Trump won independent voters by four percentage points in the 2016 election, according to the exit poll. But the group has had a negative view of his job approval ever since he took office. With impeachment likely, but conviction not (at least for now), this fact ought to be shaking the president’s re-election committee to its core.

I am prompted to write these very horse race-y thoughts by John Cassidy’s most recent column in the New Yorker. Cassidy writes that impeachment has energized Democrats in ways that will help propel them to electoral victory next year. In Washington, they are protesting outside the White House, occupying Capitol Hill and making themselves known in the halls of Congress. Elsewhere—as his interview with Ezra Levin, the co-founder the anti-Trump “Indivisible” movement, shows—Democrats are laying the groundwork for an active nationwide push in 2020 to elect Democrats, both to the White House and Congress. To this end, Levin writes

…participating in an impeachment trial may well create problems for a number of Republicans who are up for reëlection in purple and red states where Trump’s disapproval ratings are underwater. Pointing to Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Montana, and North Carolina as examples, Levin said, “These are all places where you are going to have a Republican senator forced to take a hard vote. It will be very helpful to Democrats that Senator Gardner, in Colorado, or Senator Ernst, in Iowa, or Senator McSally, in Arizona, cannot just hide behind nicely written tweets. They are actually going to have to register a historic vote and stand by it.”

And he’s right. If impeachment is popular in competitive states, Republican senate candidates might face some extra external threats to their re-election bids. But he makes a more important point in the next paragraph:

Of course, none of this means that the impeachment process couldn’t end up alienating some independent voters who believe Trump’s misdeeds don’t rise to the level of impeachable offenses, or who think Congress should let voters determine his fate next November.

Which reminds me of the graphic that leads this piece. Assuming that Trump’s 2020 presidential vote margin matches his net approval rating, independents are 11 percentage points less likely to vote for the president now than they were in 2016. That would certainly dampen his odds for re-election. So to answer Cassidy’s question of how impeachment helps or hurts Trump’s re-election chances, maybe the black line here is the one to pay attention to over the next few months:

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—Elliott