Perhaps I'm more sanguine about the hearings than everyone else because I'm more jaded about their purpose. Team Trump sent out a nasty-gram yesterday entitled "It’s official: Americans are tuning out the Swamp—and the ratings prove it". Their proof: Even more telling is what’s happened to viewership as the hearings pressed on. Once it became clear that no real evidence was forthcoming—only more opinions about President Trump from the Swamp—Americans tuned out. Tuesday’s morning session this week averaged 11.4 million viewers. By noon Wednesday, “the local ABC affiliate had ditched impeachment coverage and was airing its regular newscast instead. The Fox station had a daytime talk show,” The Washington Times reported. For perspective, "11.4 million viewers" is Monday Night Football numbers. That's "American Idol Live Eliminations in 2007" numbers. For a Tuesday fuckin' morning of talking heads preening slowly and deliberately about procedure and phone calls. 3.6 million people watch Good Morning America. Fox & Friends? About a million and a half. Drawing anything during the day is a major accomplishment and here's Team trump's spin: Team Trump recognizes that this is a battle of public opinion. The Democrats have finally done the same. The fact that Jeffrey Katzenberg produced The Apprentice while at NBC and then went over to CNN while Trump was running says a lot: news is spectacle. And for the past four years, Trump has been able to say whatever the fuck he wants while the news media "tells both sides of the story". The whole purpose of these hearings has been to give the public some pithy soundbites that demonstrate it's a pretty one-sided story. It's going to go to the Senate and the Senate will acquit. We all know this. I think the difference is that the Democrats aren't playing to win, they're playing to cost the Republicans as much credibility as possible. The Republicans hitched their wagon to Trump and the Democrats appear to have found a strategy that makes that expensive. It's not going to be quick but it's already causing some serious attrition: if Trump is contentious in your district, and if you have been backing Trump, then your re-election campaign is going to be expensive and draining. Perhaps it's time to find yourself a corporate board or two? Meanwhile the paradigm adopted by the Democrats is AOC - young, mad, media-savvy and hungry. Mr. McNamara, you were never going to win. You were fighting for your ideals. We were fighting for our homes. - unnamed Viet Cong general, The Fog of War (paraphrased) The goal has never been to eliminate Trump. The goal has been to make Trumpism expensive. It's fair to characterize the 2016 election as a battle of competing apathy and while the Democratic electorate is waking up to patriotism, the Republican electorate is facing a schism between "base" and "humans" that the Democrats wish to make as hard to bridge as possible. I find the hearings ruthlessly effective at this. Really, it's the Democrats learning how to TV. 'cuz the thing is? Yeah the kidz are all tictocin' and snapchattin' and retweetin' but the people you want to stay home in shame in November? They watch daytime TV.The ratings prove it. Simply put, they’re stunning. Despite wall-to-wall media coverage and attention, the first televised impeachment hearing last week drew an estimated 13.8 million viewers—nearly 6 million fewer than when former FBI Director James Comey testified before the Senate two years ago. And this is for impeachment.
Or think of it this way: “There are about 330 million Americans. According to the ratings, nearly 320 million of them aren’t watching the House impeachment proceedings.”
According to 538 the gap between those who support impeachment and those who don’t has actually closed, unfavorably for impeachment over the course of these proceedings. Sure, you can make Trumpism expensive. And we see that in some of these Governor elections and the House elections next year. But how do you fix gerrymandering? How do you fix voter education and political literacy? How do you fix our epistemically crisis (god that article hit he nail on the head)? Trump and his cult, to me, are symptomatic of those issues. We can get rid of Trump, but have we cured the underlying issues?
I lost a lot of faith in polling in general and 538 in particular when they said Clinton had a 91% chance of winning. I think there's a lot of emphasis given to numbers that nobody has that good a bead on. Have we cured the underlying issues? Hell nah. But I watched the Republican Party burn the press down with Iraq. That whole Nigerian rods thing they pushed in the NYT obliterated American trust of the press forever and Facebook rushed in to fill the void. Most big cons you can pull once and "rogue populist" has been played. The next dumbshit Republican ploy is going to be something else; they're not going to let a Trump happen again it's been too personally corrosive for them. There are now more Millennials in America than there are Boomers and every year, that ratio gets worse. I'ma guess you missed this: Go check pages 9 and 10.
Totally missed that. Going to read it, venture off to some rock walls near Yakima (how timely considering this conversation), and respond back in a couple of days!