key republican senator lisa murkowski said she was, quote, disturbed, to hear mitch mcconnell say he was working in, quote, total coordination with the white house for the senate trial. so what does her disturbance mean? joining us now, our political analyst sun min kim and michael sheir for the new york times. great to have both of you here with us. sun min, what does it mean? what do you take away from lisa murkowski saying that out loud in an $view? it underscores how mitch mcconnell has handled part of president trump s impeachment process. and we heard a little bit of criticism when the focus shifted to the senate.
all right. the iowa caucuses are a little more than one month away. and the ad wars, well, they are heating up. politico reporting that billionaire candidates tom steyer and michael bloomberg have already spent, get this. a whopping $200 million on tv and digital advertising. that is more than all of the other candidates combined. back with us to discuss this seung min kim and michael sheir. this is an unprecedented amount of money. they are dwarfing the field. they haven t broken out. what is or could be the impact of this mammoth spending? well, that s yet to be seen, clearly. but it is certainly a major amount of money. you see kind of the strategy that particularly the former new york mayor michael bloomberg is trying to take here because he s
figure out the number of hours for the opening arguments and punt that question of witnesses further down the line. and recall that while mcconnell clearly doesn t think witnesses are necessary, he hasn t ruled out that option. and perhaps that would be enough for, you know, the folks like romney and collins to side with mcconnell on the procedural steps at least at the outset. but obviously we ll have to wait and see how much the pressure builds on them in public for bringing some of these witnesses on board. michael, taking into account your skepticism about the possibility of any republicans peeling off, do you think there s any new information that could cause republicans to move? is there any bright line that would cause them to question this president and the need for witnesses? well, i mean, i suppose so. you know, there s not the house has said that they re continuing to keep the investigation open to the extent that new information comes in. but i think, you know, they r
also sort of distanced herself from how mcconnell said he was in total coordination with the white house. but certainly by far lisa murkowski is the plomost explic of the criticism. she was candid about how she saw or how concerning she found president trump s phone call with the ukrainian leader. she s been a wild card for us to watch for some time now. just a little bit about her history, she has a fiercely independent streak. she s not someone prone to arm twisting by senate party leadership. she is someone who lost her republican primary in 2010, was kind of ditched by her own party leadership. but won re-election by the strength of her own campaign. she does have a lot of loyalty to leadership. yeah, that was a fascinating race. she won re-election as an independent on a write in. michael, my question to you is when you look at the list of
and remember jeb bush spent $55 million as well and he clearly languished until he eventually dropped out early in the race in 2016. i mean, here s one possible metric. here s one of the latest national polls, michael. you see here that bloomberg, okay. he s only at 4%, however, this is an nbc news/ wall street journal poll. he has leapfrogged all of these people. castro, gabbard, booker, yang, that have been doing a lot more of the, you know, old fashioned just shoe leather retail politics than he has. absolutely. money can buy you name recognition. that is, you know, if that weren t true, people wouldn t be spending hundreds of millions of dollars in presidential campaigns ultimately on advertising. there are two things that it generally can t buy you. having spent a lot of time in iowa and new hampshire and the early states, the people who