DENVER -- Across the country, the first public airing of the impeachment drama had millions of Americans tuning in -- and, in some cases, deliberately tuning out.
Cattle rancher Jeffery Gatzke in South Dakota was listening in as he worked on his tractor in his workshop. The first public hearings on impeaching President Donald Trump are political show, he thinks, but he wanted to follow along anyway.
Tech manager Adam Cutler arranged to work from his Denver home so he could witness live the moment he hopes will expedite the end of the Trump presidency.
For many, the hearings were simply background noise.
"Oh, is that today?" said 63-year-old Randy Johnson, a semi-retired Tennessee man, as he cast a fishing line into the gulf in St. Pete Beach, Fla.
Mary Tabor, a 20-year-old math major at the University of Cincinnati, studied at the library rather than watching live, figuring she'd get the summary from comedian Seth Myers' late-night show.
"I know some people are really into it and others just don't pay much attention," said Tabor, a supporter of Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
"I don't want to say it will be the tipping point, but I think it will be the beginning of a week or two where it will be very difficult for the president to change the subject," said Cutler, the Denver tech manager who watched from home.
Cutler supports Democrats' push to impeach the president for his dealings with Ukraine.
For Gatzke, a 50-year-old farmer and rancher from Hitchcock, S.D., the Ukraine affair was just the Washington establishment's latest attempt to thwart an outsider president.
"He is not one of them and they don't like it," he said, just before the hearings began. Gatzke caught as much as he could during his morning chores on the farm. He had to break to load up cattle for the processing plant. His wife, Sheila Gatzke, watched, too, and fumed about what she claimed was testimony based on "hearsay."
Christian Jacobs, 50, sat in a bar on the beach in St. Petersburg, Fla., reluctantly watching the hearings on television.
"I did not want this," he said, glancing at the TV. A Democrat, he had initially balked at impeachment but has come around to it as details trickled out about Trump's behavior with Ukraine.
"I'm so afraid, left to his own devices, what else he may do," Jacobs said of Trump.
While Democrats control the House of Representatives and likely have the votes to impeach Trump, they would need about 20 Republican senators to vote to convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors before he would be removed from office.
The U.S. diplomats who testified Wednesday weren't expected to offer new blockbuster evidence that would change the dynamic. Their statements had already been offered to the committee and many of the details were public already.
That took some of the air out of the event, noted Pilar Esperon, as she waited for a train in Boston's South Station. A nearby television was turned to the hearing, but few patrons watched it closely.
Esperon, who works in real estate in New York City, was scrolling through the news coverage on her phone. She said she already believes Trump committed an impeachable offense.
"Presumably most of these witnesses will say what they said in their written testimony," she said. "So all you'll get is a lot of posturing by a lot of people in front of the camera. I don't think anything will really move the needle."
Live witness testimony during the impeachment investigation into former President Bill Clinton did little to shift public opinion, said GOP pollster Whit Ayres. Clinton was impeached, but the Senate would not remove him from the White House amid his sky-high approval ratings.
"The more likely outcome is that it will make red states redder and blue states bluer," Ayres said of the Trump impeachment hearings.
Information for this article was contributed by Russ Bynum, Tamara Lush, Philip Marcelo, Dan Sewell and John Raby of The Associated Press.
A Section on 11/14/2019