Democratic voters concentrate on candidates, not impeachment

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Democratic voters concentrate on candidates, not impeachment

2019-10-19 12:24 Last Updated At：12:30

In the liberal strongholds of Des Moines' west side and the Iowa State University campus in Ames, not once was South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg asked by voters recently about the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump.

It's not that the investigation into the president's request for foreign help in his reelection effort is an afterthought for Democrats whose votes in Iowa will start the nominating process. Quite the opposite.

Instead, it's that the impeachment inquiry is so ingrained in the 2020 campaign that there's little point in bringing it up.

Democratic voters say they don't expect that the president will be removed from office, so they are concentrating instead of selecting the strongest opponent to unseat him.

"Impeachment is about getting the facts, and right now they look pretty damning," said Lisa Banitt, an Ames physician, who was among about 900 who came to hear Buttigieg at Iowa State. "But it doesn't really affect my thinking. We need to act as though Trump is going to be the candidate and concentrate on who should challenge him."

To that end, Democratic voters appear to be marching more uniformly than their party's candidates, who, as a group, have offered at times uneven responses to the prospect of an incumbent president facing impeachment while seeking reelection.

"It's one of those matters of such gravity and such importance that you simply have to let the politics play out however they will," Buttigieg said. "So, we're just going to have to let it play out and deal with the politics on the back end."

Questions to candidates about impeachment in early voting states have been often sporadic at best.

Michele Slawson, a Democrat from Des Moines, firmly supports the impeachment of Trump for requesting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's help in investigating Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

But she was uninterested in Buttigieg's approach, talking before the South Bend, Indiana, mayor took the stage outside Theodore Roosevelt High School on a recent Saturday evening.

"Do I expect him to solve it? No," said Slawson, a financial systems analyst. "I'm really looking for any differentiation on policy and personal interaction between him and others, like Elizabeth Warren and Beto O'Rourke."

Roy Hagen, a factory worker from small-town Welton in rural eastern Iowa, put it more simply.

"I don't think they ought to be consumed with that because there's a lot of important things out there and he's not one of them," he said, attending a campaign event for California Sen. Kamala Harris on Thursday.

There's little point in trying to convince early primary and caucus audiences, it would seem. While polls show Americans overall divided over Trump's impeachment and removal from office, Democrats are firmly in support of both the proceedings and the outcome.

Fully 89% of Democrats approve of the House of Representatives' decision to conduct an impeachment inquiry, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Ninety-three percent think Trump has done things that are grounds for impeachment.

A recent Quinnipiac poll, in addition to finding 9 in 10 Democrats expressing approval of the impeachment inquiry, found 85% of Democrats saying they think Trump should be impeached and removed from office.

Whether they're asked about it or not, candidates nod to the inescapable topic of impeaching a sitting president seeking a second term, but it is not a point of emphasis.

Warren, an early impeachment supporter in April, only briefly touched on it at the top of her remarks before diving into her standard speech during a house gathering in Keene, New Hampshire, one day after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced plans for the inquiry.

"I'm glad to see that the House has stepped up, and I hope we do this, and I hope we do it quickly," Warren said.

Shortly after Pelosi's announcement, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker got an unusually vague question while campaigning in suburban Des Moines: "Can you say a few words about the I-word?"

After Booker's puzzled look disappeared after realizing the subject was impeachment, he riffed on a string of clunker jokes before turning serious and recalling the day he took his oath of office in the Senate.

It's an example of how some approach the topic grudgingly, if rarely.

Harris declined to discuss impeachment at all during her first trip back to Iowa this month, and mentioned it only briefly the following day: "We have a crook in the White House who deserves to be impeached."

That same day, Harris, campaigning in rural Cedar County, received no questions from her audience about impeachment.

Biden is an exception, announcing his support two weeks after Pelosi's announcement, and in a major speech in New Hampshire that echoed his campaign's theme of challenging Trump's moral authority.

"He's not just testing us," Biden said. "He's laughing at us."

Buttigieg offered a nuanced view, suggesting that impeachment is a symptom of the deep divisions that would await a new president, who he argues will be tasked with uniting the country.

"We certainly can't ignore what's going on with the impeachment process," he told his Ames audience. "We've got to have that constitutional process play out and continue to focus on these issues that really can bring Americans together."

But Democrats need no convincing of the need for it, retired nurse Judy Voss of Davenport said Thursday at a Biden campaign stop there.

"I think they've talked enough about it," Voss said. "The Democrats can't do anything at this point except let people know what's going on."

Venice launches experiment to charge day-trippers an access fee in bid to combat over-tourism

2024-04-25 12:09 Last Updated At：13:42

VENICE, Italy (AP) — Under the gaze of the world’s media, the fragile lagoon city of Venice launches a pilot program Thursday to charge day-trippers a 5-euro (around $5.35) entry fee that authorities hope will discourage visitors from arriving on peak days and make the city more livable for its dwindling residents.

Signs advising arriving visitors of the new requirement for a test phase of 29 days through July have been erected outside the main train station and other points of arrival.

Some 200 stewards have been trained to politely walk anyone unaware of the fee through the process of downloading a QR code. A kiosk has been set up for those not equipped with a smartphone. Once past designated entry ports, officials will carry out random checks for QR codes that show the day-tripper tax has been paid or that the bearer is exempt.

Transgressors face fines 50 euros to 300 euros. The requirement applies only for people arriving between 8:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. Outside of those hours, access is free.

“We need to find a new balance between the tourists and residents,’’ said the city’s top tourism official, Simone Venturini. “We need to safeguard the spaces of the residents, of course, and we need to discourage the arrival of day-trippers on some particular days.”

Venice has long suffered under the pressure of over-tourism, but officials say that pre-pandemic estimates ranging from 25 million to 30 million visitors a year — including day-trippers — are not reliable and that the pilot project also aims to come up with more exact figures to help better manage the phenomenon.

By contrast, registered visitors spending the night last year numbered 4.6 million, according to city figures, down 16% from pre-pandemic highs.

Venturini said the city is strained when the number of day-trippers reaches 30,000 to 40,000. Its narrow alleyways are clogged with people and water taxis packed, making it difficult for residents to go about their business.

Not all residents, however, are persuaded of the efficacy of the new system in dissuading mass tourism, and say more attention needs to be paid to boosting the resident population and services they need.

Venice last year passed a telling milestone when the number of tourist beds exceeded for the first time the number of official residents, which is now below 50,000 in the historic center with its picturesque canals.

“Putting a ticket to enter a city will not decrease not even by one single unit the number of visitors that are coming,’’ said Tommaso Cacciari, an activist who organized a protest Thursday against the measure.

“You pay a ticket to take the metro, to go to a museum, an amusement park; you don’t pay a ticket to enter a city. This is the last symbolic step of a project of an idea of this municipal administration to kick residents out of Venice,” he said.

Venturini said about 6,000 people had already paid to download the QR code, and officials expect paid day-tripper arrivals Thursday to reach some 10,000.

More than 70,000 others have downloaded a QR code denoting an exemption, including to work in Venice or as a resident of the Veneto region. People staying in hotels in Venice, including in mainland districts like Marghera or Mestre, should also get a QR code attesting to their stay, which includes a hotel tax.

The tourist official says interest in Venice's pilot program has been keen from other places suffering from mass tourism, including other Italian art cities and cities abroad such as Barcelona and Amsterdam.