Republicans and Democrats alike are bracing for the upcoming House hearings on the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, seeking out tea leaves for what the proceedings could mean for two crucial election cycles.
The House select committee’s hearings, set to start in prime time on Thursday, have Republicans both skeptical of and aligned with Donald Trump bullish the former president — barring an unforeseen bombshell — gets bailed out by the public’s focus on inflation and other frustrations with the Biden administration.
Democrats, meanwhile, are hoping the prime-time viewing offers a chance to turn the spotlight away from issues that could be politically damaging and toward what they see as a threat to democracy, with committee members previewing a damning account of the insurrection. But even that strategy risks sparking the perception that the party is tone deaf to the economic anxieties of everyday Americans, leaving Republicans optimistic that the hearings won’t change a heavily favorable political atmosphere.
“The challenge right now is the only people focused on Jan. 6 live inside the Beltway and work inside the Beltway. Voters are not paying the least bit of attention to any of this stuff. They are focused on gasoline prices, they’re focused on cost of living, they’re focused on supply chain problems, they are focused on a myriad of other issues. And this is process, this is politics as usual,” said GOP pollster Robert Blizzard.
That optimism flies in the face of what committee members are boasting will be must-see viewing.
The committee has hired a television producer to stitch together a narrative of the day of the Capitol attack as well as the surrounding efforts to overturn Trump’s loss in 2020, which panel members allege amount to a direct threat to democracy itself.
On top of that, the committee is stacked with staunch Trump foes, including Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who have indicated the former president is a top political target as he mulls a 2024 presidential bid.
“The select committee has found evidence about a lot more than incitement here, and we’re going to be laying out the evidence about all of the actors who were pivotal to what took place on Jan. 6,” Raskin said during an interview with Washington Post Live on Monday.
“I think that Donald Trump and the White House were at the center of these events.”
However, the committee faces stiff headwinds in trying to drag Trump down enough to diminish his standing.
An NBC News poll released Monday showed that 45 percent of Americans say Trump was responsible for the riot, a drop from 52 percent of Americans who said the same thing in January 2021.
On top of that, the hearings will need to break through noise around the economy, the coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and more, leading to speculation that voters will just simply tune out hearings that ordinarily would make top headlines.
“The people who could be persuaded to change their opinion or to form an opinion that they now don’t have are not going to be watching this,” said GOP strategist David Kochel. “They view everything as a partisan act, and it’s not relevant to their lives.”
What’s more, Trump is already a defined figure after decades in the public spotlight and seven years since he launched his first presidential bid in 2015.
“There’s no voter out there sitting around today thinking, ‘Well, I still haven’t decided about Donald Trump. I’m waiting for the Jan. 6 commission to issue its report.’ Trump has been decided for voters,” Blizzard said.
Several of the half-dozen sources who spoke to The Hill said the hearings could have the same effect as the one former special counsel Robert Mueller appeared at in 2019 to discuss his findings regarding allegations of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.
Democrats at the time cast the appearance as a blockbuster display by a hard-nosed investigator but were disappointed after Mueller’s halting testimony.
“Everybody said Mueller’s the ultimate fighter, he doesn’t lose, he’s methodical, he’s a genius, he’s a workhorse. He got a couple of convictions, and at the end of the day, he didn’t lay a glove on the boss. Trump’s a competitor, and from a competitive standpoint, it was a victory,” said one Trump ally. “Victories always have you stand up a little bit taller and get your rhetoric a little bit hotter.”
Still, uncertainty hovers over the hearings, and both Republicans and Democrats say a bombshell could change that calculus in 2024.
The panel has already interviewed several former Trump administration officials and obtained communications that members say portray a full-court press to alter the results of the 2020 election. And while some of the evidence has already been leaked to the media, it’s unclear what the panel may have up its sleeve.
“If this goes really badly for the president, it could be that primary voters might say, ‘We’re going to go for the Trumpiest candidate who’s not Trump because they won’t have this particular baggage to worry about,’ ” said Kochel. “If these hearings go the way the Democrats want, that’s a possibility.”
Some Republicans did voice concern that Trump could derail their narrative if he feels the need to respond to the hearings, noting that voters in midterm primaries have shown they don’t care as much as he does about voter fraud allegations in an election that happened two years ago.
“Trump can’t help himself but to probably answer every single piece of information that comes out of this committee hearing. And voters, even ones who agree with him about the election of 2020, are no longer focused on it,” said GOP strategist Mike DuHaime. “Even the vast majority of voters who think that there were some problems with 2020 don’t believe somehow Joe Biden is going to be un-sworn in and that Trump is going to magically come back.”
Democrats, for their part, are welcoming a possible change in narrative.
“It’s a risk for Trump and his servants in the House Republican caucus because it instantly, on TV, in prime time, refocuses the story and America’s attention on the last place that they want it, which is Donald Trump’s role and his supporters’ role and House Republicans’ role in the most terrifying seditious attack on American democracy in 200 years,” said Democratic strategist Jon Reinish.
Reinish said Democrats should handle the hearings the same way Republicans once handled an investigation into a terrorist attack at a U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, which the GOP used to lambast Democrats. But now, such a strategy could risk backfiring for precisely the same reasons the panel’s impact may be blunted in the first place.
“I think it could be really almost a blowback against the Democrats. There’s all these other issues going on between inflation, the border, you’ve got other issues rising in terms of gun violence, you’ve got abortion as an issue, the economy, just anxiety in general. And this is the focus?” Blizzard said. “This is not to belittle the day, but this is not something that voters are focused on right now when they can’t even afford to fill up their gas tanks.”