A cascade of witness testimony and documentary evidence has made it more difficult for Republicans to plausibly deny the basic reality that President Trump dangled a White House visit and withheld aid to Ukraine as part of an effort to pressure the country into announcing they were going to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden.
For some Republicans in deeply red states who have more to fear from a primary than a general election, it’s politically necessary to defend Trump no matter what emerges. But the issue is trickier for Republicans in many other states, where even though supporting impeachment and alienating Trump voters would likely be a death sentence, at the same time, defending any and all Trump actions will be a liability in a general election. Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, though he won’t actually be up until 2022, clearly falls into the latter camp, and his comments on impeachment likely will prove a road map for Republicans running in competitive states and congressional districts in 2020.
“None of it has changed my fundamental view on this,” Toomey told the Philadelphia Inquirer, referring to recent developments on Ukraine. “I think there needs to be a very high bar for removing a president from office. It has never happened in the history of the republic, and I think this president has made errors of judgment and he has said and done things that I don’t agree with, but I have yet to see something in my mind as a high crime or misdemeanor that warrants overturning the results of the last election.”
From the get-go, there was never any chance Democrats would convince the required 20 Republican senators to vote to convict and remove Trump from office, and that’s not going to change. The question has always been about what political price would senators up in competitive states pay among the general electorate for standing with Trump. As things look worse, I think the Toomey argument, essentially the “bad but not impeachable” case, will gain more traction. Assuming a Senate trial would spill into 2020, these Republicans will also be able to claim that given it’s an election year, the Ukraine matter should be adjudicated by voters.
At that point, the Democratic argument will have to focus on 1) the necessity of showing nobody is above the law and 2) making the case that Trump’s abuse of power shows that we can’t be confident in the integrity of the 2020 elections with him in the White House.
