The Atlantic Politics Daily: Women Are More Likely Than Men to Back Impeachment

It’s Thursday, October 31. After today’s party-lines vote, the House is scheduled to begin its week-long recess today, and the president is holding a rally in Mississippi. The Atlantic’s politics team will be watching.

In today’s newsletter: ¶ People. GOP, Katie Hill. ¶ Places. Manheim, Pennsylvania, Minute Maid Stadium. ¶ Things. Keep America Great jack-o’-lanterns.

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« TODAY IN POLITICS »

(Tom Brenner / Reuters)

232–196. GOP defections: 0. Now the more public phase of the impeachment process is about to begin.

Despite a few murmurs in the weeks leading up to Thursday’s vote, the House formalized next steps in the inquiry along party lines. In some ways, the final tally can be read as a win for the president, our politics writer Russell Berman argues:

Trump’s critics will dismiss the vote as a procedural affair, which is almost always a straight party-line vote in the House. But in other ways, this resolution—merely affirming an impeachment investigation, not judging any articles themselves—should have been the easiest for Republicans to go along with. Instead, lawmakers once again retreated to their corners of comfort. [Read the full story here.]

How Americans more broadly regard the impeachment inquiry is still fuzzy math, with some nationwide polls showing around 50 percent support and some swing-state surveys showing tighter margins.

But the president continues to struggle among women voters. Elaine Godfrey reports:

Given that women skew much more Democratic than men, it seems logical that they would align with the broader Democratic Party on removing Trump from office. But multiple national and state-level polls show that even independent and politically unaffiliated women are more supportive of the inquiry than their male counterparts. That these women in particular are backing the inquiry could be a bad sign for the president. [Read the full story—which goes beyond the few commonly cited polls—here.]

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« ARGUMENT OF THE DAY »

(MARCIO JOSE SANCHEZ / AP)

10 months into her first term, Democratic representative Katie Hill of California resigned. The politics around the rapid crash of her career in Congress are alarming; the details revealed of her alleged transgressions humiliating, our contributing Quinta Jurecic argues:

This is the first instance of which I am aware when a politically aligned publication has published an explicit photo of an opposition politician for apparent political gain. It’s both a sign of how ugly the political landscape could become and a reminder of how ugly, for the many ordinary people who have suffered this kind of abuse, the world already is. [Read the full argument here.]

+ Read more from Quinta: “A presidential candidate shouldn’t be endorsing the potential prosecution of a political opponent.” (From June 2019)

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« WHAT OUR POLITICS TEAM IS READING »

¶ This, from Franklin Foer, is so lovely it hurts a little.
—Nora Kelly, senior editor on our politics desk

¶ There’s been so much writing on the president’s evangelical advisers, so I was grateful for this story: It unpacks why certain Christian leaders who seem to have nothing in common might still politically align themselves, and looks at the heavy Pentecostal influence in Trump’s religious circles.
—Emma Green, who covers politics and religion for The Atlantic.

¶ This is one of the first stories I’ve seen on the struggle of being a Supreme Court reporter, since the contentious confirmation fight over Brett Kavanaugh last year.
—Saahil Desai, an editor on our politics desk

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« BEFORE YOU GO »

(JACQUELYN MARTIN / AP)

Elaina Plott, one of our White House reporters, found herself deep in the middle of a Trumpworld celebration in Manheim, Pennsylvania this week.

The event was officially the Trump campaign’s “Halloween Witch Hunt Party.” And it was weird, to say the least.

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« ABOUT US »

Today’s edition of our daily newsletter of political ideas and arguments was written by Shan Wang, with help from Saahil Desai.

Comments, questions, or even reading recommendations for us? Reply directly to this newsletter, or email politicsdaily@theatlantic.com. See you tomorrow.

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