Hello and welcome to this impeachment reaction edition of the 538 Politics podcast, I'm doing OK. Today, President Trump became the first president in American history to be impeached twice.

I'm sure listeners probably already know that at this point. The House voted two hundred and thirty two to one hundred ninety seven to affirm a single article, Incitement of Insurrection. 10 Republicans voted for impeachment. We'll discuss who they are. That makes it a bipartisan effort and the most bipartisan impeachment vote in history. But that is less than the up to two dozen Republicans that some reports initially suggested might vote for impeachment. So for some background here, yesterday, the third most powerful Republican in the House, Liz Cheney, announced that she would vote to impeach the president.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's office appears to have also told reporters that he backed the effort in the House, although he has not made clear if he would vote for conviction in the Senate. He said he would wait for the trial arguments to decide, but that he would not call the Senate into session earlier than January 19th in order to hold that trial. So here with me to talk about the impeachment vote and what happens next is senior politics writer Perry Bacon Junior.

Hey, Perry. Also here with us is senior reporter and polling editor at the Huffington Post, Ariel Edwards Levy. Hey, Ariel. Hey, welcome to the podcast.

It is quite the episode for you to be joining us for, so I appreciate it. I should also say that Nate is still on vacation, quite the week to be on vacation. If you can remember, back to the first impeachment, I was actually on vacation when the House began those proceedings. So I guess we have a tendency to choose. Interesting weeks to be on vacation here on the podcast. But let's get into all of this. I think first and foremost, Perry, how should we think about the partisan breakdown of the vote we just saw?

Is 10 Republicans more than you would have expected or less than you would have expected?

It's actually more that I would have expected. I sort of thought the reports, the two dozen seemed off to me, but it's easy to say now. I didn't do a prediction beforehand. But I think the key numbers here are you're going to read a lot about the 10 Republicans who broke ranks with the biggest number is the one hundred and ninety seven who did not sense what happened at the Capitol. You've had basically four votes in the certifying, the votes in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

We had those two votes last week. We had the 25th Amendment vote yesterday. And then today we had this impeachment vote. The majority of the Republican caucus in the House in all four cases took the Trump view, meaning they opposed invoking the amendment, they opposed impeachment, and they wanted to reject the votes in Arizona and Pennsylvania. So that's that. And then only 10 Republicans of the two hundred and seven who voted on this voted for impeachment. That is goes to the point the you know, Liz Cheney was high profile.

She was also an anomaly, a very big anomaly. Like and I wasn't surprised this was partisan. But I think any sense that somehow politics or partisanship or the Republican Party changed based on last Wednesday, you can now be clear, was not the case. The Republicans who did vote on impeachment.

I kind of want to break down the Republican Party's decisions here because there were various positions that were taken within the party, at least in the house. We've heard very little out of the Senate so far. Let's start with the people who did vote for impeachment. Aryal You spent a lot of time looking at public opinion. As far as you can tell, the Republicans who did vote for impeachment, why did they do it?

That's a good question. And I think this is actually a case where I think you see elite opinion sort of leading public opinion rather than the other way around where people are reacting to the cues of their constituents. We did some preliminary impeachment questions after the initial attack on the Capitol, and we found our numbers at least were sort of pretty close to where they were the last time around, which is, you know, Democrats were very supportive of the idea of impeachment and it had pretty limited GOP support.

We also found in our polling that Republican voters perception was that Republican leaders were less supportive of Trump than they had said in past polls that he had less intraparty support. But that didn't seem to affect yet their own support for the president. Now, we've seen his approval numbers drop in the last couple of days. I think we're still in a very kinetic situation here. But I think that a lot of what you saw with people taking these votes was.

Representative sort of stepping out a little bit ahead of their constituencies rather than reacting to a call from inside their party that this is what should happen next, and that actually gets at a question that I asked you earlier this week and that I've been thinking about a lot, which is the which comes first, the chicken or the egg.

Does elite opinion within the party end up changing the views of their constituents, or is it mostly the other way around? Actually, you will see more senators vote for conviction in the Senate if there's a big shift in public opinion. As far as your research in this area goes, like who has more power in this situation? Is it the politicians or the people?

It's sort of tough because it's coming at this time where you're already you know, it's right after an election. We're already about to see this change of power and see this new dynamic under a new administration and see this sort of new era of what people were going to be making of different policies. And so you sort of expect to see a shift in a lot of public opinion anyway, just based on who is president and people reacting against a very different presidency that looks to be shaping up.

So it's going to be sort of hard to point and say, how did this change? I think one thing that we're going to really want to look at is what does the Republican Party look like going forward and how much loyalty does Donald Trump have after he's left office? Is the Trump wing something that's going to stick around? And to what extent?

I have a thesis about this that is like the parties are different. My sense is that the Democratic Party voters are pushed by elites. And I would give two examples of this. The first was in twenty nineteen. There was a bubble of discussion about impeachment the whole year. But throughout the year Pelosi was like, no, no, no. And you saw in the polls a lot of Democrats were for it was a big split. When Pelosi and the leadership in the House got behind impeachment.

You saw immediately a bunch of support for impeachment get really high. The second example I would give was once the primary got close to Biden won South Carolina, he got some momentum. But also basically the entire Democratic Party went on TV and said, get to be Joe. Bernie can't win the election. It seemed to me that the polls suggest and the results suggest that the elite signals were followed. On the other hand, the Republican Party in 2015 and 2016, the leadership said, no, do not support Donald Trump.

And the voters were like, we don't care what you think. And so since then, I think the report I think the Republican officials are right that the elite function in that party I don't think is working. I think Trump has influence on the Republican voters. I don't think the sort of rank and file members of Congress have really any impact. And I think they're the members in the Republican caucus are probably right to think, look at the polls first and do what they say and to be skeptical of their abilities to influence the polls.

I agree with that. And I think especially what you pinpointed with the way that Democrats reacted in the last impeachment shows that sort of movement. And it really remains to be seen. And it's a very open question, how much voters in the Republican Party consider themselves to be the Trump wing and how enduring that is. I was looking back at some of our polling in twenty fifteen right before Trump became the Republican consensus nominee. And given what we know now in the last four years, it's very amazing to see the sort of first polling when he was floated as a candidate in which he had almost no support, in which people were saying this is not the direction we want from our party.

And so that accumulated very quickly. I don't think it's going to disappear as easily as it came. But, you know, you'll see sort of how much loyalty he has over public opinion or whether some of that drifts back to the Republican Party when he has so much less of a platform than he has for the past few years.

Yeah, when we look at those early caucuses and primaries all the way back to 2016, we see that the kind of core support for Trump is like 30 percent of the Republican Party or something like that. I don't know if we can use that as a proxy for the always Trump, you know, group of Republicans. But I am curious, based on the different arguments that we heard, which ranged from the Marjorie Taylor Green, all in True Believer, still talking about conspiracy theories and things like that versus some of the Republicans who voted for impeachment, like Peter Maer, a freshman from Michigan.

Where are the different groupings of the Republican Party, at least as far as elections go right now?

So I would go from like sort of left to right for lack of a better way to think about the I think there are a few sort of people who are sort of moderate ideologically and sort of anti Trump, I might say, Susan Collins. Is this the best example, the Lisa Murkowski, Governor Larry Hogan of of Marilyn? I think that's a pretty small group. Second, I would say the sort of like people who are pretty conservative on policy but are sort of democratic norms, people and that kind of thing, who don't like the way Trump behaves but sort of vote for his policies.

I think the leaders of that would be Ben Sasse and Mitt Romney with a number of them wanting to maybe Mike DeWine, the governor of Ohio, is another person. So those are both two camps. I think the biggest camp is probably what I would call the Mitch McConnell, John Thune kind of traditional Republican group. And that group of people is like people who are not necessarily who sort of see where the party is going. They started off being sort of trumps skeptical.

They now see that their base likes Trump. So they try to get behind Trump. They're in public. They're very open to Trump. Occasionally in private. They try to like, you know, try to subvert his goals. They don't like it, but they generally know that their base is with Trump. And he there's a fourth group that is more pro Trump, like I think Kevin McCarthy in the House, who's a little bit more emphatic about Trump than McConnell, will disagree with Trump occasionally.

The House Republicans, I think mostly in this in this fourth group, which you almost always agree with Trump, and there's a fifth group, I would say, Jim Jordan of Ohio, some of the Kuhnen member who are union members who are like, you know, full on maybe to the right of Trump, more conspiratorial than Trump. And I think those are the five blocks I would draw.

Yeah. Can you get any sense of how well the public lines up to those five different blocs?

I think that's something that, again, as good as the explicated, a little bit more over the next couple of weeks when I first started pulling on Trump voters, we used to type it out by people who supported him in the primary versus people who supported him in the general election. So Republicans who had a different first choice but came on to the Trump coalition eventually. And there were notable differences between those blocks. And you saw it in sort of embraces of things like xenophobia.

We looked at this a lot around. The child separation's at the border and people in his primary voter group were often outright supportive of this. Whereas the other group you would see things more like, well, it's not the best thing, but, you know, it was less outright enthusiasm. So that's something I think that might be sort of an interesting divide to look at right now. It's difficult to know sort of what the divides are in the Trump coalition beyond the ideological one we've seen so much the last couple of years that politics is this main dividing line.

And after that, all other demographics tend to sort of vanish in the best. Looking at the Republican Party, I don't know if you can say, oh, there's this clear age split, there's this clear regional split that defines whether somebody is a Trump Republican or a different kind of Republican who was sort of a law when it was expedient. But I think that's something that will be clear to break out, especially in the next couple of months.

Right. A lot of the ways that we learned to talk about the divides in the Democratic Party were a result of how the most recent primary played out. And so the Republican Party is going to do a lot of the work of defining those divides in the coming years. I'll mention, because we launched at 538, our impeachment public opinion tracker today, that right now we show that 15 percent of Republicans support impeachment. That compares to forty eight percent of independents and 84 percent of Democrats.

Which brings us to a grand total of around 53 percent of Americans supporting impeachment, compared with 42 percent of Americans not supporting impeachment. And you mentioned that we had seen a little bit of a tick down in approval over the past few days. We're now down to 40 percent approval and 56 percent disapprove. I think we'll continue to see that number drop as we get more polls in and then within the Republican Party, whereas we had seen in the 90s and high 80s approval, we're now starting to see some approval numbers in the high 70s.

So just to throw a bunch of numbers at people to lay a numerical marker down for where we are in this moment before some of these divisions and a new maybe a new path forward starts to emerge.

So the polls in the last impeachment suggest that about 10 percent of Republicans favor that. If you looked at polls and as people Trump versus Kasich or Larry Hogan, when there was idea they run in the primary, you'd see about 10 to 20 percent people who favor them. Generally, the sort of anti Republican is more likely, the rest of it to be under 45. They're less likely to be evangelical. They're more likely to be women and people of color.

There's a general again, this is a very small or people and a very small number of Republicans who are people of color. But that said, the demographic of those people might be more women, more non-white, definitely distinctly not as evangelical. I think it's an important one to think about. And then a little bit younger is. So that's worth thinking about as you go forward, looking like Adam Kinzinger has voted for the invoking the 25th voted for impeachment.

He's a House in Illinois. And Liz Cheney is the two that I think they're both in that I think they're in their upper 40s, mid 50s. They're both trying to court. I think this like who this top Republican is. And I'm guessing both of them are going to explore, like, is my future more running for president as the kind of anti Trump Republican than it is to be to be in the House leadership much further?

And I have also heard that Adam Kinzinger has some interest in potentially running for governor in Illinois, which may also influence the way that he votes in the House. So we mentioned earlier on that part of what McConnell and Cheney were doing in publicizing their approval to a greater and lesser degree of this impeachment process is trying to move public opinion being the elite signals away from Trump. Those are two very powerful people within the Republican Party.

Why didn't those signals cause more Republicans to get on board? We saw 10 Republicans vote for impeachment. Why did we see two dozen or why didn't we even see the 60 that voted to certify President elect Biden's victory?

I mean, I do think that you have a pretty powerful countervailing force in voters in these districts who, as we've been talking about, are still very pro Trump and. Also, it's hard to think from a purely electoral standpoint right now, like I don't think that they're thinking that could be immediately punished for voting against this. So I guess you could say that it's more that they were allowed to do this and that they were given the carrot and the stick to do this.

It's you have permission, you have some cover. But it's not like this was something that Republicans were really getting, like, whipped into voting on this. So my sense is I would doubt that Liz Cheney or Senator McConnell thought they were going to change any Republican views in the short term. I think this was more of a they want to say that they oppose Trump and they think that in and I hate to say this in the judgment of history, they think they think they might be right about this.

McConnell runs for reelection next in twenty twenty six. If he runs for reelection, he'll be eighty four then this may be his last term. I'm guessing he's not worried about any kind of backlash to it. It'll be more where he is. I think Liz Cheney is criticized Trump enough already to where her career is going to be limited if the party becomes fully Trump. So I don't think she was afraid of this vote. I don't think Liz Cheney is under the illusion that she was going to move Republican voters by herself or in any means like that.

I have to imagine if you're in the religion party, this is sort of a long term thing where you think Trump is out of office, he's off Twitter. You can sort of gradually move away from them, maybe about twenty, twenty four. You can have a non Trump person, but there might there's probably more likely to be kind of a Mike Pence than Liz Cheney is my assumption. Sort of a less pro Trump nutty anti Trump person. In other words, do we have a sense from the polling area what Republicans think about their party currently or what direction they want to go in from here?

One thing that we found is that Republican voters do not really feel like they are winning or that they are getting I mean, understandably, they just lost the presidency and the Senate. And you often will see voters turn against their party a little bit in the aftermath of a loss. And to some extent, we didn't really see that reckoning over the last couple of months because it was disrupted by President Trump pretending that he hadn't lost. So instead of seeing this sort of conversation of, you know, the usual postmortems, why did the party lose?

What direction do we need to go in? Is this an existential issue or just something that can be changed? We had a lot of people denying that they had actually lost. So I think that discussion probably needs to start to happen pretty soon in the next couple of months. I imagine that you're going to see a lot of people turning on the party to some extent, but also, given how polarized things are, it's not like these people are going to be reaching across the aisle.

So I think we see how disenchanted they are, whether that affects the sort of voter enthusiasm. And it'll be a couple of years, I think, until we see that actually tested. But we should get a sense of whether people are souring on the party. And congressional leaders have never really been popular with the Republicans to begin with, which is another factor, I think, in the GOP elite thing there. Yeah.

So does turning on the party mean turning on the Republican Party or doesn't mean turning on Trump?

You know, right now for the past couple of years, there's been so little distance for most of the time between Donald Trump and Republicans in Washington. If you ask people, they will say the most. There's most Republican lawmakers support Trump and we're seeing them back away from that. In a way they think. The last time we saw that was during the health care debate, which if the party starts splintering into coalitions, where do people fall? And does Trump keep that sort of base of support?

And again, Republicans, I don't think tend to love their congressional leadership. If you ask Cruz the main figures in their party, who they feel this emotional attachment to, that's mostly been President Trump. But he's leaving office now. And the question for Ari, let me see if I can frame it. Well, the question is, what are the polls really capturing? And then I'll explain. What I'm trying to ask here is some of these polls are showing 20 percent of people think what happened to the capital was OK, Republicans.

I'm skeptical. If I went to their House and asked them, they'd be like, yes, I want the Capitol to be invaded by crazies. But I think a lot of these questions are sort of asking people, do you approve of Trump is doing a good job? Do you believe election results? A lot of these questions are sort of asking people to take away their political opinions and assess these things independently and tell the pollster from the fake news that, oh, no, Trump obviously lost.

Trump is obviously lying. Obviously, the people in my party who invaded the capital are a crazy nut. Jobs like are we assessing real things or these polls or are we often trying to get people to reject their partisanship and partisan environment? And unsurprisingly, they're not going to do that. Is it possible their actual attitudes are different than what they're saying because they're being asked to disregard their values and their. They're political votes. I think that is such a key question and it really does matter how you frame this and there's been sort of debate in the last couple of months about partisan signaling, which is when you ask Republican voters, do you think that Donald Trump really lost?

Are they telling you how they actually feel? Are they saying I'm a Republican, that I support Trump? And does it really matter what the impetus is? One question that we've been asking is, you know, we asked about the insurrection at the Capitol a bunch of different ways. One question is thinking about the actions of the supporters. Do you think they were mostly right? They were mostly wrong or they went too far. But they have a point.

And we also asked, do you feel like they represented people like you? And so we saw sort of an interesting dynamic with, you know, Republicans and Trump voters when we asked these questions, where the sort of baseline question, do you approve of this? Most said, no, I disapprove of this. Most said they don't represent people like me. But a plurality. Forty six percent of Republicans in our survey said they thought that the people went too far, but they had a point.

And even though we didn't include this as a question, when we asked people to put it in their own words, what had happened, a lot of people volunteered the theory that the violence wasn't really people like that from the other side. So you see this sort of coalition of different justifications. And I think one thing that's interesting is we're watching this develop in real time where people haven't really decided what the Republican line is on this. But you see this thing where it's bad, but also it went too far.

But also the people who went too far maybe weren't associated with me. And it really does matter a lot how you ask these questions, because I think and I don't think that's a failure of polling to some extent, because I think people's views on this are really complicated.

So I guess when you bring up all of those different polling questions, I wonder when it comes to the legitimacy of the election or this false idea that it was the other side that attacked the capital.

Are those the kinds of things that change with time and distance? Will the vast majority of Republicans come to believe that Joe Biden legitimately won the election six months on, a year on? Will they come to see that it was pro Trump extremists alongside white nationalists, antisemite white supremacists, et cetera, who attacked the capital? Or do these things endure even if they become maybe Salian? I don't know with time.

I mean, we've already seen, I think, some movement on the question of whether Biden is going to be president, where Republicans have in the last week, I think there was some YouGov polling showing that Republicans who are admitting that Biden is going to be taking office has jumped like 20 points. You do see things sort of coalesce into this sort of conventional wisdom of what it means to be in the party, especially for people who are highly politically engaged and they're sort of tuned into what that wisdom is.

And, you know, I'm I'm trying to think of one of the last conspiracies we saw was one that Donald Trump pushed, which was about the false idea that President Obama was not born in the US. And even when Trump himself backed away from that when he was a candidate, you sort of saw some Republicans backing away from say they outright believed in that. But it was very hard to get people away from that idea. You know, you couldn't get people to say, no, that's not true.

So I think that a lot of these things have some staying power, but they may or may not be top of mind to people when it's not the main topic of conversation in the news.

I think the question is sort of tilting around is like, is the Republican Party Romney Republicans are Trump Republicans. And if they like if Romney and Trump running in the primaries each other. My sense is it would be eighty five, Trump 15. Romney. Is that generally what you guys think is? I think that's what we're sort of hinting at here. We don't really know. But that's kind of my assumption as I cover these things. It's like there's a is a Romney group, but it's way overrepresented in the press and in the elite circles compared to voters.

Yeah.

Again, just looking at the last the last time we've been asking questions, were we asked, do you consider yourself mostly a Trump supporter, mostly a supporter of the Republican Party? Both, neither. And among Republicans, we found that forty one percent plurality said mostly supporters of Trump, which was pretty similar to last month, and very few said that they consider themselves mostly supporters of the GOP and not Trump. The rest were mostly saying both. So I think right now the Trump wing is very clearly the dominant wing of the Republican Party.

The only sort of question to me is how durable that is.

Yeah, we should ask more people because I only know what I know. The poll that we've already discussed, what the polling can tell us. I would be curious to hear from Republicans themselves, the people responsible for trying to elect these people, what they actually think the direction of their. Partisan and perhaps we'll do some of that in the coming days and weeks before we wrap this up. I do want to talk about what comes next. Senate majority leader who will be Senate minority leader beginning next week has said that he is not going to start an impeachment trial immediately.

That will wait until January 19th. What is the process for that and how do we expect Republicans in the Senate to respond to all of this?

So McConnell is pretty clearly said now that he's not starting a trial. So at some point, Schumer will become the majority leader and then the question is really going to be there, which is that an impeachment trial inherently usually takes a few weeks. And the Republican Party has some incentive to make the impeachment trial longer because Trump is no longer their problem on some level and they can sort of grind up the Democratic agenda if they want to. So this is going to be a real question.

I'm of the view that Joe Biden might tell somebody in the next few weeks, you know, Trump's already gone anyway. Maybe we should focus on stimulus bill more and impeachment less. And I just think that's prime this idea. I know there's a lot of talk right now that there can be a vote by two thirds. The Senate can convict Trump then with a majority of the Senate, can bar Trump from ever being in office by a majority. So I'll believe it when I see it, when I see 17 Republican senators vote for impeachment despite the entire party, as we've been saying, liking Trump.

So there's a process by which Trump, who most Republicans voted for twice, being disqualified from office. I don't see it. I guess I'm curious, do the Democrats even have the backbone to push this forward after Trump's out of office? And then will any Republicans join them as by saying and I think the answer to those questions are probably I don't think the Democrats are the backbone. I don't think the Republicans are joining them. And so I think Trump's worst day is probably been today.

And this is I think there's like a calculus on the Democratic side, too, where there is the sort of political norms, calculus of what does it mean for the country? Do we have an obligation to send a signal about this behavior to firmly cast this is outside of the norm to stand against this. And then there's sort of the political calculus of what do we want the first few weeks of the Biden administration to look like and not to overestimate the importance of that messaging necessarily, because I think we're going to see a lot of change regardless.

And the pandemic is probably going to be much higher in voters minds. And also, there's going to be a couple more years before we get our first referendum on the Biden presidency. But, you know, I think there is going to be consideration about what is the message that Democrats want to send when they have the presidency and they have the legislative branch again. And do they want to continue this referendum on Donald Trump or do they want to start talking about some of the policy initiatives that they're going to push?

And I don't know that that's a question that has from that particular perspective, an easier and obvious answer. But I think it's something we're all going to be talking about exhaustively over the next couple of months.

Also, just looking back, impeachment get less popular as it went through in 2019 or 2020, right? The conventional view, the view they expect will be impeachment will get voters will get tired of it and it will get less popular. My expectation is yours, too. That seems reasonable to me. And, you know, I think we're especially right now the moment this has happened, where a you're seeing more condemnation from Republicans that you have in the past and that's getting a lot more play.

You're still seeing the video of the attack on the Capitol. Last time we saw support for impeachment growing, it was because, as we talked about earlier, Democrats were coalescing around the idea. Democrats have coalesced. So unless you see some new and probably shocking movement among Republicans toward the idea of impeachment once Trump is out of office, I think probably we're pretty near the ceiling right now. But I've learned enough to not make definitive statements about anything.

I guess what I think about this, there are two factors that I think of. One, it seems from reporting that we've seen over the past couple of days, as well as statements from lawmakers that there are more videos to come out. There is more evidence that the public doesn't fully understand what happened inside the Capitol on January 6th. You know, there has been some suggestion that there were actual Republican lawmakers that were in touch with these rioters. Also there, according to reporting from CNN, is video of the lawmakers being led out of the chamber.

And that that's quite dramatic. So there are other pieces of evidence that could emerge that could shift public opinion. The countervailing force is that one of the arguments that we heard overwhelmingly from Republicans today is we're in the middle of a pandemic. Don't you want unity? You said you wanted unity. Now, that may be somewhat absurd to say after all of this that you want. Unity, you could also create unity in opposition to this attack, but put that aside, that message seems like it would resonate with voters who maybe are more concerned about getting a two thousand dollar stimulus check than convicting a president who's already out of office.

So those are the two columns, essentially, in my mind, of the things that could shift public opinion from here.

Yeah, I think that's a reasonable concern and especially once again, back that sort of interplay where if these videos are coming out, if that either shifts public opinion because people are going to be watching this, because consuming this media or it shifts the opinion of lawmakers because some of them, once this comes out, feel the need to take a stronger stance than either one of those could change the calculus and also could sort of keep this at the forefront of everybody's mind for a little longer.

One final big question in Trump's legacy here is whether or not he gives himself a pardon. I guess that could also shift opinion to some extent from what I have seen. Giving yourself a pardon and giving members of your family a pardon. Doesn't look popular. Have you dug into the polling on that?

No, I have not. My complete instinctual reactions that that seems like something that actually would not move the needle as much as you might think. And my reason for that is basically, does that not sound like something that's in keeping with many of the things that have happened throughout the Trump administration? You know, we've done polling on political corruption a lot. And I think there's this sort of idea that it's endemic in Washington, the sort of idea of the swamp.

And I found that the sort of corruption analogy and that sort of line of attacks against Trump has not been one of the more successful things in terms of peeling off his supporters when we've seen real movements in his support. It's things like Charlottesville or like the Capitol riots, which sort of offend the conscience of the nation to some extent, or it's things like the health care debate in which he was failing to get things done, looking weak in fighting with his own party, the sort of thing drip, drip of corruption or advisers being caught doing something or family conflicts.

I haven't seen that have a huge effect on people's opinions. I think for an average senator, that would make it a little easier to vote to do something negative. And if Trump is basically self admitting to crimes, it'll be easier for Murkowski to be like, well, you know, he already I mean, so I think you might go from like two Republican senators to five voting for conviction if Trump is sort of pre fully pardons his children and basically announces he has to pardon himself, that might help them a little bit.

Not the majority, but a couple more, I think.

All right. Well, only time will tell. I say that so many times on this podcast, and it remains true. But let's leave it there. Thank you so much, Perry and Ariel, for joining me today for the first time in history that an American president has been impeached for a second time. Thanks, guys. Thanks. They give my name is Gaylan. Tony Chow is in the virtual control room. Claire Better, Gary Curtis is on audio editing and get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538 Dotcom.

You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple podcast store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we'll see you.