Source: Politics<\/p>\n
The conventional wisdom about the Jan. 6 committee hearings was that no single revelation was going to change Republican minds about Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
What happened instead, a slow drip of negative coverage, may be just as damaging to the former president. Six weeks into the committee\u2019s public hearing schedule, an emerging consensus is forming in Republican Party circles \u2014 including in Trump\u2019s orbit \u2014 that a significant portion of the rank-and-file may be tiring of the non-stop series of revelations about Trump.<\/p>\n
The fatigue is evident in public polling and in focus groups that suggest growing Republican openness to an alternative presidential nominee in 2024. The cumulative effect of the hearings, according to interviews with more than 20 Republican strategists, party officials and pollsters in recent days, has been to at least marginally weaken his support.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is definitely kind of this wet drip of, do you really want to debate the 2020 election again? Do you really want to debate what happened on Jan. 6?\u201d said Bob Vander Plaats, the evangelical leader in Iowa who is influential in primary politics in the first-in-the-nation caucus state. \u201cFrankly, I think what I sense a little bit, even among some deep, deep Trump supporters \u2026 there\u2019s a certain exhaustion to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s public approval rating among Republicans remains high as he prepares for a widely expected run for president again in 2024<\/a>. He still tops most primary polls, and Republicans largely haven\u2019t been persuaded by much of what the Jan. 6 committee is doing. They were more likely last month than last year \u2014 before the hearings began \u2014 to describe the events of Jan. 6 as a \u201clegitimate protest<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n But for many Republicans, the ongoing, backward-looking call-and-response between the committee and Trump may nevertheless be getting old.<\/p>\n \u201cI think what everybody thought was that the first prime-time hearing was such a non-event that that would continue,\u201d said Randy Evans, a Georgia lawyer who served as Trump\u2019s ambassador to Luxembourg. \u201cBut over the course of the hearings, the steadiness, the repetitiveness, has had a corrosive effect. You\u2019d have to be oblivious to the way media works, the way reputations work, the way politics works, to not understand that it\u2019s never the one thing. It\u2019s the accumulation.\u201d<\/p>\n Evans said, \u201cThis is all undoubtedly starting to take a toll \u2014 how much, I don\u2019t know. But the bigger question is whether it starts to eat through the Teflon. There are some signs that maybe it has. But it\u2019s too early to say right now.\u201d<\/p>\n For more than a year after Trump lost the presidential election, his political durability was not even in question. But the committee hearings appear to have had an effect on Trump\u2019s enormous fundraising operation<\/a>, which has slowed in recent months<\/a>. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who may run in 2024, has been gaining on Trump in some polls, including in New Hampshire, the first primary state, where one recent survey<\/a> had DeSantis statistically tied with Trump among Republican primary voters. Republicans are still poring over a New York Times\/Siena College poll last week<\/a> that showed nearly half of Republican primary voters would rather vote for a Republican other than Trump in 2024.<\/p>\n In a series of focus groups with 2020 Trump supporters from across the country since the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2001, Sarah Longwell, a moderate Republican strategist who became a vocal supporter of Joe Biden in 2020, for more than a year found about half of participants consistently said they wanted Trump to run again. But that number has fallen off since the hearings began, she said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve had now three focus groups where zero people have wanted him to run again, and a couple other groups where it\u2019s been like two people,\u201d Longwell said. \u201cTotally different.\u201d<\/p>\n The Trump supporters in her focus groups are still dismissive of the hearings, Longwell said, \u201cand I don\u2019t think people are sitting down and being persuaded\u201d by them.<\/p>\n However, she said, the hearings have \u201cturned the volume up on the Trump baggage.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe other thing,\u201d she said, \u201cis I cannot tell you how much these Republican voters want to move on from the conversation of January 6th.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s a far cry from the Republican view of the hearings when they started: Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) derided what he called a \u201cprime-time dud<\/a>.\u201d Jim Justice, the Republican governor of West Virginia, dismissed them as \u201cpolitical theater<\/a>.\u201d And Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri called them a \u201ccomplete waste of time<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n One reason that the hearings are resonating now is that even if Republicans don\u2019t agree with the committee\u2019s findings, they read polls. The percentage of Republicans who say Trump misled people about the 2020 election has ticked up since last month<\/a>, while a majority of Americans say Trump committed a crime. Perhaps most problematic for Trump, 16 percent of Republicans in the Siena College survey<\/a> said they would vote for someone else in the general election or aren\u2019t sure what they will do in 2024 if Trump is the nominee.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a relatively small segment of the Republican electorate, but a critical one in competitive states that will decide which party controls the White House.<\/p>\n \u201cI think you\u2019re starting to see the impact of the hearings, and just overall his behavior since he lost the election,\u201d said Dick Wadhams, a former Colorado Republican Party chair and longtime party strategist.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s got a hard-core base, and there\u2019s no doubt about that,\u201d said Wadhams. \u201cI voted for him twice, I loved his accomplishments. But I do think he\u2019s compromised himself into a situation where it would be very difficult for him to win another election for president.\u201d<\/p>\n Electability concerns may loom especially large this year for Republicans, who view Biden as a beatable incumbent. His cratering public approval ratings, now hovering below 39 percent<\/a>, are worse than Trump\u2019s at this point in his presidency. One senior House Republican aide described the resonance of the Jan. 6 committee hearings as in part a product of the contrast they are drawing between \u201ca golden opportunity to win back the White House in 2024 and the only person who might not be able to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Trump has regularly criticized the committee\u2019s work as a partisan exercise. And because most other Republicans view it that way, too, it\u2019s unlikely that many of Trump\u2019s opponents will leverage the committee\u2019s revelations explicitly in the run-up to 2024.<\/p>\n Still, the Republicans who may run against Trump in 2024 are increasingly breaking with him as the midterm year drags on. <\/p>\n On Friday, former Vice President Mike Pence will campaign in Arizona for gubernatorial candidate Karrin Taylor Robson<\/a>, while Trump that same day appears in the presidential swing state for Robson\u2019s rival for the GOP nomination, former TV news anchor Kari Lake. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, among others, have split with Trump in midterm endorsements in other states<\/a>. So has outgoing Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who engaged in proxy war with Trump in the gubernatorial primary<\/a> held Tuesday in Hogan\u2019s home state.<\/p>\n As much has anything, those midterm primaries \u2013 coinciding with the Jan. 6 committee hearings \u2013 have laid bare the willingness of Republicans in at least some cases to disassociate their adoration for Trump with support for him politically. Trump\u2019s endorsement has pulled Republicans across the line in competitive primaries in places like Ohio<\/a> and Pennsylvania<\/a>, but his chosen candidates have flopped in other races, including in Georgia<\/a> and Nebraska<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThe effect of the hearings will be negligible on Trump\u2019s favorable ratings among Republicans,\u201d said Whit Ayres, the longtime Republican pollster. \u201cThe \u2018Always Trumpers\u2019 and the \u2018Maybe Trumpers\u2019 are resolute in their insistence that they are paying no attention whatsoever to the hearings. It\u2019s almost an article of faith among Republicans to say, \u2018I am not paying attention to these hearings\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n However, Ayres said, \u201cThe way it translates is that they believe that other candidates will carry less baggage \u2026 and that gets reinforced by what seeps into the political water from these hearings. <\/p>\n And as the Jan. 6 committee prepares for another hearing on Thursday, the ongoing focus on Trump\u2019s behavior on Jan. 6 is now in the political waters.<\/p>\n John Thomas, a Republican strategist who works on House campaigns across the country, said that in recent conversations with state party chairs and Republican activists in numerous states, \u201calmost to the T, and I don\u2019t really care what state it\u2019s in, they all say, \u2018Love Trump, love his policies, wish he would just be a kingmaker.\u2019 And that\u2019s really a shift, because six months ago, a year ago, it was, \u2018Trump\u2019s got to run again, he\u2019s the only one who can fight the swamp, drive the policy agenda.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not Trump hatred,\u201d Thomas added. \u201cIt\u2019s Trump fatigue. I think [the Jan. 6 committee hearings] reminds people to the degree that they\u2019re tuning in that, eh, is this that important of an issue? No. But damn \u2026 And then Trump goes on his rants and it\u2019s like, \u2018We\u2019re tired of it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\u2018Political Theater\u2019<\/h5>\n
Proxy wars<\/h5>\n