Democratic voters concentrate on candidates, not impeachment

AMES, IOWA » In the liberal strongholds of Des Moines’ west side and the Iowa State University campus in Ames, not once was South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg asked by voters recently about the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump.

It’s not that the investigation into the president’s request for foreign help in his reelection effort is an afterthought for Democrats whose votes in Iowa will start the nominating process. Quite the opposite.

Instead, it’s that the impeachment inquiry is so ingrained in the 2020 campaign that there’s little point in bringing it up.

Democratic voters say they don’t expect that the president will be removed from office, so they are concentrating instead of selecting the strongest opponent to unseat him.

“Impeachment is about getting the facts, and right now they look pretty damning,” said Lisa Banitt, an Ames physician, who was among about 900 who came to hear Buttigieg at Iowa State. “But it doesn’t really affect my thinking. We need to act as though Trump is going to be the candidate and concentrate on who should challenge him.”

To that end, Democratic voters appear to be marching more uniformly than their party’s candidates, who, as a group, have offered at times uneven responses to the prospect of an incumbent president facing impeachment while seeking reelection.

“It’s one of those matters of such gravity and such importance that you simply have to let the politics play out however they will,” Buttigieg said. “So, we’re just going to have to let it play out and deal with the politics on the back end.”

Questions to candidates about impeachment in early voting states have been often sporadic at best.

Michele Slawson, a Democrat from Des Moines, firmly supports the impeachment of Trump for requesting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s help in investigating Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

But she was uninterested in Buttigieg’s approach, talking before the South Bend, Indiana, mayor took the stage outside Theodore Roosevelt High School on a recent Saturday evening.

“Do I expect him to solve it? No,” said Slawson, a financial systems analyst. “I’m really looking for any differentiation on policy and personal interaction between him and others, like Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke.”