Agreed with everything until you got to the bolded part. There you fall into the same trap all of us here nearly without exception, myself included, has fallen into at times:
we think the public has been paying attention as much as we have.
Let's look at some statistics:
1. 138 million Americans voted in the 2016 presidential election:
https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/post-election-2016/voter-turnout
2. Fox News averages 2.3 million viewers a night. MSNBC 1.5 million. CNN 744,000:
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/fox-news-beats-cnn-msnbc-combined-in-ratings-tops-all-of-cable
You add that up, that's 4.5 million people that watch the cable shows on a regular basis. (I'm going to assume, with good reason, that includes most of us.) That means that 97% of the people who will vote for President in 2020 aren't paying attention to any of this on the regular basis that we are. They're not watching Fox, or MSNBC, or CNN. If they get any news at all, they're getting headlines.
3. Now 5.3 million watch the nightly network news:
https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/network-news/
We can assume that at least some of these 5.3 million are the same folks who are watching the cable news. But for the purposes of this discussion, lets not. That makes 9.8 million, let's round it up to 10 million people we can consider "reasonably informed". Still less than 10% of the voters.
4. Now, at the moment, we do not know how many people are watching these impeachment hearings. But since they are being shown on every network, as well as social media, we can assume that it will be high. We can also make a reasonable comparison: 20 million people watched the Christine Blasey Ford testimony:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-impeachment-tv-factbox/factbox-trump-impeachment-hearings-likely-to-draw-high-ratings-in-new-era-of-political-tv-idUSKBN1XI1EJ
I would assume, reasonably, that MORE people will watch these hearings. True, it doesn't involve sex or rape, but it does involve President Trump, who gets extremely high ratings. But lets stick with the 20 million figure. That means 10 million people who haven't been paying attention are doing so now. And they're not watching the Fox or MSNBC or CNN shows to tell them what to think. As for the rest of the 140 million voters? Their impressions will largely be based on word of mouth.
Do you guys see why I have been saying these hearings will change everything? They probably already have.