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The Jan. 6 hearings are breaking through in key battleground states. Partisan rifts remain.
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The Jan. 6 hearings are breaking through in key battleground states. Partisan rifts remain.

PITTSBURGH — The House Jan. 6 committee hearings appear to be breaking through in some of this fall’s most competitive congressional districts in key states,

Politics

PITTSBURGH — The House Jan. 6 committee hearings appear to be breaking through in some of this fall’s most competitive congressional districts in key states, though the panel’s work does not appear to be making a major impact on how voters view candidates for Congress and governor.

One of the biggest questions surrounding the Jan. 6 committee is whether voters, particularly in states such as Pennsylvania and Arizona, have taken notice of its findings. Of more than a dozen voters — Republicans, Democrats and those who identified as independents — interviewed in three hotly contested swing congressional districts in those two states, most indicated they were paying at least some attention to the committee. Their takeaways, however, differed, with some feeling the committee had strengthened the case for then-President Donald Trump’s culpability in the riot while others felt it amounted to congressional overreach.

Joseph Ganter, 73, from Ross Township, Pennsylvania, has been paying close attention to the committee, which is probing the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and its recent hearings. Ganter says he voted for Trump in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020 and now says he’ll never vote for president again, disillusioned with them both.

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“In my opinion, he started it,” Ganter said of Trump, speaking with NBC News before last Thursday’s prime-time hearing, which he said he planned to watch. “He got on his [Twitter] and sent out messages and he let it go for, what, 90 minutes or something like that? And he let it go and I thought that was very wrong that he didn’t do a thing.”

Ganter, a longtime registered Democrat who now considers himself an independent, lives right in the heart of one of this fall’s most competitive House districts, Pennsylvania’s 17th Congressional District. He says he doesn’t think the committee will lead the Department of Justice “to do a damn thing” when it comes to potential consequences for Trump.

"Even though Trump was guilty on a lot of stuff, they’re not going to get him because they’re afraid it’s going to interrupt the country again," he said. "So, you judge it for yourself."

Robert, 72, from North Hills, who requested that his last name be withheld to share his opinion on touchy political issues, told NBC News that he had watched the committee’s first hearing, caught part of its second and followed news coverage closely.

“I think people have really begun to see how desperate Trump was to stay in office,” Robert, a lifelong Republican before voting for Biden in 2020, said. “And it seems like he would have gone to almost any extreme to remain in the office and he would have tried really hard to pull any strings he could. He thought that maybe he was above the law. Now things are coming back to bite him.”

The two men are the kinds of voters who could go a long way in deciding some of the more widely anticipated elections this fall, including for Senate and governor in Pennsylvania and Arizona. And they’re among the millions of Americans who have been watching the Jan. 6 hearings; Nielsen estimates that 17.7 million people watched Thursday’s prime-time hearing, and the hearings overall have each averaged 13.1 million viewers.

But the hearings did not seem to play a major factor in how either man was approaching how he would vote this fall. Both said they were leaning toward state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, in Pennsylvania’s high-stakes governor's contest, against state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Republican who was outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 and has pushed election conspiracy theories. In the Senate contest, Robert said he was “very torn” between Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Republican Mehmet Oz, while Ganter said Oz’s limited history in the state was coloring his view of the race.

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the open seat in their home district just outside Pittsburgh as a toss-up. NBC News also visited Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District around Scranton, where Cook rates Democratic Rep. Matt Cartwright’s re-election as a toss-up, and Arizona’s 4th Congressional District, just east of Phoenix, where Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., is running for re-election in a contest the publication rates as leaning Democratic.

At a campaign event last week in northwestern Pennsylvania, Shapiro spoke at length about Mastriano’s presence outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, arguing Mastriano is “unfit” to oversee the state police because of his actions that day.

“When the police looked at Mastriano and the others and said stop, he kept marching,” Shapiro added.

Shapiro said it was hard to assess what impact the Jan. 6 hearings were having on his race, though he would continue to press Mastriano’s ties to Jan. 6 as part of his campaign.

“I think that makes him unfit,” he said. “I stand on the side of law enforcement, respecting law enforcement. He stood on the side of the insurrectionist mob.”

Recent surveys have shown the hearings may be making a difference in how some voters view the Jan. 6 attack, but, as with Ganter and Robert, they're not making it a priority as a voting issue. An NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll released ahead of the committee’s prime-time hearing last week — with a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points — found that 80% of Democrats, 55% of independents and 44% of Republicans are paying at least some attention to the hearings.