Do Jan. 6 hearings change minds? What California voters say

Even before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection called a single witness, Amador Martinez had seen enough.

“It’s on him,” he said of former President Trump, who capped his efforts to overturn the 2020 election by siccing an angry and vengeful mob on the Capitol. “One hundred and ten percent.”

Melody Douglas also made up her mind long before the first hearing was gaveled open in TV’s prime time.

“It’s a sham,” she said of the committee and its work. “It’s just an effort to make Trump look bad. Hopefully, he’s holding his head high.”

The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, as the panel is called, has offered a riveting account of a power-mad president and the crises his ego and insecurities foisted on the country.

Its public hearings, in eight installments, have drawn millions of viewers, offered a strong case for Trump’s criminal prosecution and illustrated in lurid detail — f-bombs, thrown tableware, abuse of Secret Service agents — the pathology of the president and his hissy fits.

What the hearings have apparently failed to do, at least so far, is change a great many minds or alter the way voters seem to be approaching November’s midterm elections.

For Caitlyn Miller, the committee’s findings merely reinforce what she believed all along, that Trump did nothing to stop the violence and will probably get away with his sordid behavior, along with Republicans who aided and abetted his attempt at a coup.

“It’s kind of annoying to listen and watch and read how s— everyone was,” said Miller, 30, an office worker in Modesto, “and then to think no one’s going to be held responsible.”

Her focus this election is on other issues where, the Democrat believes, her vote could make a difference: climate change, abortion rights and seeing that the Supreme Court doesn’t roll back other personal freedoms, like same-sex marriage.

“I do not want to see Republicans in control,” Miller said emphatically, thrusting her arms out as though she could personally shove House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy away from the speakership.

Democrat Caitlyn Miller said the Jan. 6 hearings reinforced her belief that President Trump acted irresponsibly.

(Mark Z. Barabak / Los Angeles Times)

Nationwide, there are relatively few House races that are genuine toss-ups; perhaps three dozen or so.

One of them is here in the Central Valley, where Democrat Adam Gray and Republican John Duarte are vying to represent a newly created district sprawling south from the outskirts of the Bay Area.

The 13th Congressional District is mostly rural — two-lane highways, farm stands, feedlots, endless orchards — save for a slice of Modesto, its next-door neighbor, Ceres, and Turlock.

With the temperature topping 100 degrees this week and the sky mottled with smoke from yet another Yosemite wildfire, the doings of lawmakers in Washington seemed quite remote. In interviews across the district, voters talked about inflation, drought, homelessness, water, the resurgence of COVID-19 and, especially, high gas prices.

“There are a lot of other things going on in the world,” said Sharon D., a 50-year-old Trump voter and mental health clinician in Ceres, who called the investigation into the Jan. 6 violence and its roots a waste of time and money. (She asked not to use her last name, to avoid harassment.) “Nobody cares anymore.”

Unless something dramatically changes after the committee resumes its hearings in September, the insurrection probably won’t play much of a role in deciding who wins the open congressional seat.

Democrats praised Gray, a 44-year-old state assemblyman, for his work in Sacramento. Republicans said Duarte, a 55-year-old farmer who also helps run a family-owned nursery, is the perfect fit for this agriculture-dependent district.

Most people were like Douglas and Martinez, who didn’t connect Jan. 6 to the local contest and aren’t about to be swayed no matter what the committee finds.

Douglas, a 60-year-old Republican homemaker in Empire, considers Trump “the best president we’ve had in a long time” and hopes he runs again in 2024.

Republican Melody Douglas called the hearings “a sham” intended to damage Trump.

(Mark Z. Barabak / Los Angeles Times)

She firmly believes the 2020 election was stolen and the rioters who overran the Capitol were undercover leftists who set out to incriminate the former president. Nothing and no one — certainly not the Democrats and two Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kitzinger, on the committee — can convince her otherwise.

In fact, she hasn’t bothered to watch a minute of the hearings, Douglas said, and why should she? In her eyes everyone in Washington is corrupt and needs to go.

“Start again with honest people,” Douglas said, “like it was back in 1776.”

Martinez, who stopped by the post office in Ceres moments after Douglas left, had a word for people like her. “I think they’ve been manipulated,” he said.

“I knew something was wrong when Trump said he could kill someone on Main Street and get away with it,” Martinez went on. (Actually, Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, which he undoubtedly would with some of his more fanatic supporters.) “I thought, ‘Oh, my God. It’s bad.’”

The 55-year-old landscaping contractor, a Ceres Democrat, said he has closely followed the hearings and believes it was every citizen’s duty to do so.

“We need people to take responsibility,” Martinez said of the assault on the Capitol and, more, democracy itself.

Ceres Democrat Amador Martinez says it’s every citizen’s duty to follow the hearings.

(Mark Z. Barabak / Los Angeles Times)

In a red-versus-blue world where some refuse to acknowledge even basic facts, it’s hardly surprising to find partisans dug into their positions, or ignoring evidence contrary to what they choose to believe.

But engagement and persuasion are just two measures of the committee’s success, and hardly the most important.

A president flagrantly abused his power and coaxed supporters not only to invade the Capitol but lay siege to one of the country’s most important and sacred principles, the peaceful transfer of power.

He continues to lie about it and must be held to account.

Outside the public library in Patterson, a small farm town, Gail Tallman paused to state her support for the Jan. 6 hearings.

Voters in the Central Valley talk about Jan. 6 and their top issues in November’s midterm election.

“I’ve seen every one of them,” said the 66-year-old elementary school teacher, a Democrat and Navy veteran. “It’s actually made me angrier.”

No matter the television ratings, the number of people who come away with a different perspective, or the result of the valley’s closely fought congressional race, Tallman succinctly summarized why the hearings are so vitally important.

No one, she said, is above the law.

Times staff writer Terry Castleman contributed to this report.