Yet here in New Hampshire, voters sizing up Democratic candidates see the Mueller hearings as more of an anticlimax than an inflection point.

“I feel like he’s just going to say, ‘Read the report.’ I don’t think he’s going to drop any bombshells,” said Amanda St. Ivany, 37, a nurse from Lebanon, New Hampshire, who was attending a recent Kirsten Gillibrand event in Concord. St. Ivany told me that she would probably watch some of Mueller’s testimony and that she supported the launch of impeachment proceedings “to keep our democracy working.”

St. Ivany’s low expectations for Mueller’s appearance matched what more than a dozen Democratic and independent voters told me in interviews: While some plan to watch the broadcast, and most said his testimony was important as a matter of process, none believed it would do much to alter a political dynamic that they see as lamentably immutable.

“I’ve had my hopes up before, and I don’t want to get them up again,” said Dorothy Minior, a 65-year-old software researcher at the Warren event in Peterborough.