Travel out of Washington to find out what everyday people with everyday jobs and practical problems, not the people in TV studios, are saying about impeachment, and there’s an immediate snag.
“You could try Granville,” said the waitress at Franks & Sammies in Newark, Ohio, between slinging hot dogs loaded with pulled pork, bacon, or pretty much any other animal-based product imaginable during weekday lunchtime. “It’s got the college, there. They might be political, but I don’t think you’ll find anyone here to talk to about it.”
Certainly not her regulars, who looked blank when asked what they thought about the Senate trial, nor the assistant at the county information bureau in the city square around the corner, who also recommended driving up the road to the college town.
“The people who care about it care about it a lot,” he said. Otherwise, not so much, is the message.
That will be a blow to the Democrats who opened their case to senators with a warning that the world was watching their deliberations. Even if they knew they would struggle to get the two-thirds majority needed to remove Trump, at least they could lay out the evidence against Trump and remind voters of the big decision looming in November’s election. But, if the prosperous small city of Newark is any guide, then not many people have been paying attention.
“I can count on zero fingers how many people have talked to me about it,” is how one local business leader put it.
That is the anecdote bit. The numbers bit tells much the same story, the story of a nation going about its daily business without worrying too much about the political battle unfolding in Washington.
Just under 12 million people tuned in to the six major networks to watch the first day of the Senate trial, according to Nielsen Media Research, when lawmakers began the business of settling the rules. That dipped to less than 9 million people on the second day, when House managers began their opening statements and setting out their case that Trump should be removed from office.
That’s a drop from the almost 14 million who watched the opening of the House impeachment hearings in the fall and represent less than 3% of the population.
This was much to the delight of the Trump campaign, whose Brad Parscale said he could barely bring himself to watch it — and it is his job to follow proceedings. “It’s like watching paint dry,” he told Fox News.
Online data, collected by web tracking and digital advertising company Taboola, paint a similar picture. The company found that interest in online news stories about impeachment dropped from an average of 19 million page views per day during December’s impeachment vote to about 13 million last week for the Senate trial.
Sometimes it is tempting to ask why so many people are still interested, given that the outcome in a Republican-controlled Senate is all but assured and given that the trial so far has comprised evidence already aired in the House. This is not how TV courtroom dramas work, with their sudden revelations and surprise twists.
Even last-minute events, such as disputes over whether to permit witnesses or the leaked details of former national security adviser John Bolton’s manuscript, which reportedly implicates the president in a plan to withhold aid to Ukraine unless it announced an investigation into Joe Biden, don’t have people scrambling for the remote control in most of the country, according to Jeanne Zaino, professor of political studies at Iona College.
Most people suspect he is guilty as charged, but most people know that a Republican-controlled Senate won’t remove him from power.
“People know what’s going to happen in the end,” she said. “They see it as just politics as normal: a lot of back and forth for no real purpose.”
