The House vote to approve rules for the impeachment inquiry has not only taken us into a new stage of the House’s formal proceedings, but into a new realm of impeachment politics as well. Having gathered testimony and evidence from over a dozen witnesses, Democrats are now preparing to build the case for impeachment with public testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, including new hearings with some of those witnesses who have already testified in closed sessions. Meanwhile, Republicans are reportedly preparing to move on from the endless process-based complaints about the closed-door hearings Democrats have held so far, a strategy shift that President Donald Trump himself has recommended.

The argument to which Republicans will likely shift is bound to resemble other now pro forma defenses of the president’s behavior. Whatever one thinks about the propriety of Trump’s quid pro quo, they will say, his actions were neither criminal nor impeachable and should be subject to the appraisal of voters in next year’s election. For many weeks, conservative media has been laying the groundwork for this next stage. “The White House should stop saying there was no quid pro quo,” the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro recently said. “The question is whether it was a corrupt quid pro quo. As I’ve been saying for weeks, quid pro quos in foreign policy happen all the time.”

Meanwhile, impeachment-skeptical centrists like The New York Times columnist David Brooks, continue to insist, against a preponderance of evidence in survey data, that Democrats have strayed into politically dangerous territory. “Democrats have not won over the most important voters—moderates in swing states,” he wrote Friday. “A New York Times/Siena College survey of voters in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin found that just 43 percent want to impeach and remove Trump from office, while 53 percent do not. Pushing impeachment makes Democrats vulnerable in precisely the states they cannot afford to lose in 2020.”

But Brooks fails to mention another figure from the very same poll—that swing state voters support the impeachment inquiry itself by a five point margin. Given the likelihood of Trump’s acquittal in the Senate, those voters are going to get both the process they want from Democrats, as well as the outcome they prefer: an impeachment process that doesn’t end in Trump’s removal. This, moreover, is assuming that the numbers don’t move more solidly against Trump as the process continues.

It’s hard to say whether and to what extent they might, although we know that the emergence of the Ukraine scandal did put a dent in Trump’s approval rating, as FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich wrote last week. By contrast, there has been no evidence of the impeachment backlash against Democrats—either for persecuting Trump or for diverting their attention from “kitchen table issues”—that many long predicted.