Republicans, Defiant After Debate, Throw Punches on Impeachment and Economy

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/us/politics/republicans-democratic-debate.html

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WASHINGTON — President Trump and his allies sought to turn the Democratic debate on Tuesday night into a referendum on the congressional impeachment inquiry, accusing the party’s presidential candidates and its leaders in Washington of pursuing a vendetta against Mr. Trump while ignoring more pressing pocketbook issues.

But Republicans also saw an opportunity to seize on debate moments over middle-class tax increases, health care reform and economic inequality to portray the Democrats as tax-and-spend liberals — in hopes of redirecting the national conversation at a time when public opinion is moving against the president.

In a series of early-morning tweets, Mr. Trump referred to the 12 Democrats onstage Tuesday night in Ohio as “clowns” who would wreck the economy if ever elected.

During the debate, he and his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, gloated about his prospects for re-election, sharing an image from a recent Moody’s Analytics model that showed Mr. Trump was favored to win virtually every swing state in the country, including ones he failed to carry in 2016 like Virginia and New Hampshire.

This was consistent with the nonchalance that Mr. Trump has tried to project about impeachment and questions of his political vulnerabilities. What the tweets did not include, however, was a second graphic in the model showing a likely Democratic victory if voter turnout is historically high, as it was in the 2018 midterm elections.

Tuesday’s CNN/New York Times debate was the first since Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House of Representatives would formally look into whether Mr. Trump committed impeachable offenses for soliciting Ukrainian assistance with his re-election campaign.

It was clear from the tenor of the Republican statements — which were laced with defiance, bluster and scorn — that the Trump campaign and its allies hope the president can still win over an American public that, polls show, increasingly supports the impeachment inquiry and does not believe Mr. Trump has been truthful about his actions. The remarks also were a preview of the defense that G.O.P. leaders said they were planning as the impeachment inquiry enters a critical new phase on Capitol Hill, with House Democrats calling witnesses and issuing subpoenas to associates of Mr. Trump, like Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Republicans intend to argue, in effect, that a wide range of economic indicators — from the unemployment rate to job growth — show that Mr. Trump has been far more of a success than he gets credit for, while Democrats remain fixated on attacking him personally and politically.

“Democrats spent more time talking about President Trump’s Twitter account and their phony impeachment charade than they did a positive vision for America,” said Ronna McDaniel, chairman of the Republican National Committee. “That’s because they don’t have one, and it’s going to cost them at the ballot box next November.”

Republicans also hope that the more that Democrats talk about impeachment, the more opening they will have to cast it as illegitimate.

“It’s not lost on people that many of these candidates were actually on the record supporting impeachment before anyone was even talking about Ukraine,” said Andy Surabian, a Republican strategist and former Trump White House official.

The debate, held outside Columbus, Ohio, allowed Republicans to try to make their case in a state that Mr. Trump won by eight percentage points in 2016 and has many of the middle-class, blue-collar voters that he hopes to turn out again in next year’s election. To underscore the point, the Trump campaign took out a full-page ad in the Columbus Dispatch on Tuesday that blared, “Democrats Will Kill Ohio Jobs … President Trump’s Fighting for the Economy.”

The president remains historically unpopular, however. The Gallup presidential approval poll has measured public support for his job performance at below 50 percent for his entire presidency. To overcome this skepticism, Republicans have attempted to define the Democrats as out of touch and too far to the left of where most Americans’ views are. Some of the Democratic candidates, like former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., hold moderate and liberal views, while Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont are generally more progressive.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida on Wednesday expressed the kind of binary argument that Republicans hope prevails on voters. “Last night’s debate was a reminder that while you may not always agree with everything Trump says or does, the leading alternatives to Trump mock people with traditional beliefs & support socialism, gun confiscation & free government funded health care for unlawful immigrants,” he wrote on Twitter.

With Ms. Warren the target of sustained attacks from the other Democrats onstage, Mr. Trump and his Republican allies moved to frame the race around the question of whether voters want a strongly liberal president and government in 2021.

On Tuesday night, after Mr. Sanders picked up the support of two high-profile liberals in the House Democratic caucus — Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar — Republicans jumped at the chance to make them a focal point in the morning-after debate analysis. The two freshmen are a favorite target of conservatives, who have caricatured them as the true leaders of their party.

“With this endorsement,” Ms. McDaniel said later, speaking on Fox News, “everyone should be paying attention. They will take away our freedom, our fundamental rights.”

Other Republicans saw a bigger story in the leading Democrat who was a less prominent presence on Tuesday: Mr. Biden, who seemed to veer from indignant at times to detached at others. They said his uneven performance was a sign that other candidates who displayed more gusto — like Ms. Warren, Mr. Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota — were gaining prominence at his expense.

Alex Castellanos, a veteran Republican strategist, said the debate could be a turning point when “a new race began, one without Joe Biden.”