TIFFIN — Nearly 500 miles from where House lawmakers were conducting the first public hearings in the impeachment inquiry against President Trump, Gary Click got up from his seat at a pizza restaurant.
“Have you all been watching the news lately? I’m trying not to because it makes me sick,” declared Mr. Click, a 54-year-old pastor.
A few members of the Seneca County GOP murmured in agreement as Mr. Click railed against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Vice President Joe Biden, between nibbling on pizza slices from a buffet.
“They’re guilty as sin and they want to shift the blame over to [Trump],” said Mr. Click, who’s hoping to secure the party’s nomination for the 88th Ohio House District as the most conservative of three Republican candidates.
Seneca County is as good as place as any in rural northwest Ohio to run as a Trump Republican. Mr. Trump won there by 31 points, 22 points better than Mitt Romney’s margin in 2012. Seneca is one of 14 counties represented by Urbana Rep. Jim Jordan, a powerful congressman from small-town Ohio who’s one of the 22 House Intelligence Committee members with high-profile roles in the impeachment hearings this week.
The rest of Congress, meanwhile, has other work to do, said Toledo Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur, who plans to catch up on the hearings during off hours. Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, a Republican, also said he wouldn’t be able to watch in real time.
“The majority of people aren’t on that committee,” Miss Kaptur said.
Republicans interviewed in Tiffin said they might not watch the historic proceedings, one of only four impeachment inquiries in U.S. history, and the first one playing out in the age of social media.
Whereas past generations were glued to their televisions for the impeachments of President Richard Nixon and President Bill Clinton, technology and partisanship have fundamentally altered the viewing experience for Trump-era proceedings.
“I do a flash briefing with [Amazon] Alexa and catch the highlights,” said Mr. Click, who called Mr. Jordan a “fighter” who “stands for truth” but says he wouldn’t watch “because it makes me too mad.”
“Don’t get me started on that,” said Ruth Brickner, 81. “I can’t even watch. It’s a scam.”
“Fox News, that’s all that’s on the TV,” her husband, Alfred Brickner, 83, interjected. “We have a hundred other stations.”
Mr. Brickner, a retired soybean and cattle farmer, is a lifelong Republican.
“I was the first Republican in the Brickner name,” he said. “All old farmers were Democrats.”
That dynamic, however, has been shifting for decades, with rural areas especially running up margins for Mr. Trump, whose 8-point victory in Ohio was due in part to energizing voters in places like Seneca County.
But recent polls a show a plurality of voters in Ohio and nationwide supporting impeachment. An Emerson Polling survey released last month found 47 percent of Ohioans surveyed supported impeachment, while 43 percent did not.
Voters like Mr. Brickner are in the latter camp: “It’s a bunch of bull and the Democrats are going to push it as hard as they can, and I hope they lose because they have nothing to work with,” he said.
Mr. Brickner is also among the Americans living through their third impeachment, able to contrast the events surrounding Mr. Nixon’s complicity in the Watergate break-in, Mr. Clinton’s affair with a White House intern, and Mr. Trump’s alleged quid pro quo with Ukraine.
“I remember the Nixon one very clearly,” said Paul Beck, a professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University. “I don’t think [Clinton] got as much visibility certainly as the Nixon impeachment. Part of the difference is that Clinton’s crimes for which he was impeached were of a very personal nature, offensive in many ways. Not crimes that basically implicated the interests of the United States abroad, as of course is the allegation in terms of the Trump impeachment.”
Seneca County GOP Chairman David Koehl said the country was still partisan in both eras, but not as ideologically divided.
“It was very partisan [for Clinton] and it was partisan in 1973 as well,” he said.
North of Seneca County at Bowling Green State University — in a swing county that voted twice for President Barack Obama before choosing Mr. Trump — students said they were too busy or put off by the current political climate to pay attention to the impeachment hearings.
“I try to stay informed, but I don’t like to be political,” said Taylor Thees, a 21-year-old from Toledo, who was doing work for her exercise science major in the student union Wednesday afternoon.
Mary Martha Krutsch, a 22-year-old BGSU grad born a year before Mr. Clinton’s impeachment in the winter of 1998-99, said she follows politics “less than some people, but enough to be annoyed.”
“I definitely plan to watch [the hearings], just to stay informed,” she said. “It’s so crazy to be in the middle of this historic moment while it’s happening. I always feel like I can’t see the forest for the trees.”
“This is definitely someone’s political career right here,” said 26-year-old graduate student Aaron Lair, motioning to a television above him in the student cafeteria tuned to hearing.
It was almost universally ignored.
“People are just sitting around eating, and some of them don’t even know it’s happening,” he said.
First Published November 14, 2019, 2:38 a.m.
