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 impe…