Democratic candidates avoid talking impeachment
Party viewing local issues as more important than a Trump ‘distraction’
Republicans are bracing for it. Donald Trump’s lawyer is warning about it. But Democrats running in the most crucial midterm races have so far refused to threaten impeachment for the president after his former lawyer implicated him Tuesday in directing the commission of a crime.
“I don’t want to see a two-year distraction,” said Susan Wild, a Democratic nominee who is favored to win a key Republicanheld House seat in suburban Philadelphia. “I think, honestly, impeachment proceedings would obviously derail getting other things done in Congress.”
While Wild said activists in her district and her own social media fields are often obsessed with Trump’s legal problems, she did not issue so much as a tweet to commemorate Tuesday’s developments, joining other Democrats in swing districts in her silence.
Over the last three weeks, the first two congressmen to endorse Trump for president have been indicted, a jury convicted Trump’s former campaign chairman of eight felonies, and the
president’s former lawyer pleaded guilty in a Manhattan courtroom to eight counts including a campaign finance crime, at the direction, he said under oath, of Trump.
But instead of playing to anger among their base, Democrats have decided to walk a delicate line as they try to build momentum behind the midterm elections by staying focused on bread and butter issues to woo independent voters.
It is a shift in strategy that follows Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, which was heavily focused on exposing flaws in Trump’s character. Most Democrats now believe that moral revulsion with political leaders is often only a deciding issue for voters who enjoy a level of economic security to look beyond their immediate needs.
“You’re living it every day in Washington D.C., but we’re not,” explained Ann Kirkpatrick, the Democratic nominee for one of the nation’s most vulnerable Republican House seats, in Tucson, Arizona. “I’m not hearing from people about these recent incidents.”
Republicans, by contrast, have been happy to warn about the danger of impeachment in an effort to drive up fear, and thus turnout, among Trump’s most loyal voters. “They’ve never been happy with the outcome of the election in 2016 and I expect them to continue their campaign to reverse the election by whatever means possible,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told reporters Wednesday.
Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani has been even more blunt.
“This election is going to be about impeachment or no impeachment,” he said on a recent visit to New Hampshire.
Kirkpatrick said her voters have been raising alarms about issues far closer to home than possible Russian collusion or porn actress payoffs. It’s more like the future solvency of Medicare and Social Security, the burden of student loans, the possible threats to abortion rights, and the fate of young immigrants who could lose their legal status to remain in the country.
“I have been going door to door. They are concerned,” Kirkpatrick said about the kitchen table issues. “They are worried. They are fearful.”
When she talks to voters about corruption, Kirkpatrick speaks not about Trump’s circle of implicated former advisors, but about the role money in politics plays in distorting policy to make it harder for working people to make ends meet.
That is the same message that has been picked up by Wild, who is favored to win a suburban Philadelphia seat that was vacated by Rep. Charlie Dent. She has sworn off donations from corporate political action committees.
“I always bring the reform message back not to the notion that the president might be a rotten guy but the fact that it impacts the issues people really care about,” Wild said. “The No. 1 issue on the campaign trail for me is health care. I make the not very profound leap to say, ‘If you are taking money from Aetna or Blue Cross Blue Shield, how can you be unbiased?’”
That hasn’t stopped national Democratic leaders from hammering the corruption scandals in an effort to drive enthusiasm, and fundraising, from the party’s liberal base. Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, responded promptly Tuesday with a series of rapid fire statements denouncing “the rampant corruption and criminality” of Trump’s former aides and the “rampant culture of corruption” exposed by the indictments of Reps. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., and his wife, Margaret, on campaign finance violations.
Some Democratic senators, who are not running for re-election, have also chimed in to question whether it is appropriate for Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh to be confirmed given the current scandal surrounding the president. And other Democrats have tried to put pressure on Republicans to comment on the president’s troubles, forcing them to choose between alienating Trump supporters and excusing criminal behavior.
There is a long history of midterm elections swinging in part on corruption scandals. Republicans won control of the House in 1994 after one current and one former Democratic member of Congress were indicted on a charge of misusing money from the congressional post office for personal use. Democrats retook the House in 1996 in a campaign that focused heavily on the “culture of corruption” among Republicans, which included a major Indian gaming lobbying scandal.
Democrats began preparing for a similar campaign messaging effort shortly after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, with weekly staff meetings in Pelosi’s office and an initiative by Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., to draft a set of anti-corruption reforms, including new ethics rules and stricter campaign finance disclosure, that the party could pass into law if they win back control of the House.
But as Democratic strategists studied the issue, they concluded that it was better to use questions of corruption to “caffeinate” other messages about health care, education and taxes. Too much focus on Trump’s behavior, the alleged duplicity of his aides or foreign interference in the 2016 campaign ran the risks of appearing out of touch with voter’s central concerns and alienating voters who supported Trump’s election.
Rather than talk about specific corruption in Trump’s orbit, they prefer to talk more broadly about the problem in government.
“It’s a much more systemic problem now and we have developed a much more systemic response to it,” Sarbanes said. “People just want to see that there is that sense of responsibility and accountability to them and their priorities.”