Impeachment does not look like a winner for Democrats
Mollie Hemingway:
Democratic efforts to impeach President Donald Trump were supposed to help them politically in 2020. In moments of unguarded honesty, a few Democrats admitted as much publicly, saying the quiet part loud and the loud part quiet.They are doing a good job of building support for Trump among the GOP base and at the same time pushing independents away from Democrats. That, of course, is the opposite of what they intended to happen. The GOP members in the House have not only rejected the Democrat attempt but have done a great job of shooting down the Democrat arguments. Their chances of peeling off Republicans in the Senate to vote for their coup attempt are so low they are approaching nil.
.@RepAlGreen: “I’m concerned if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected. ... We must impeach him.”
It’s a great example of how this particular impeachment push keeps backfiring on Democrats. They claim, without evidence, that Trump was trying to get Ukraine to meddle in the 2020 election by asking for their cooperation in investigating Ukrainian efforts to meddle in the 2016 election. And they claim that this is such a dire threat that Trump must be removed from office and disqualified from running in 2020. Yet their own impeachment effort is about retaliation for 2016 and the hope that they can politically damage Trump heading into the 2020 election.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced Thursday that she would like articles of impeachment drafted, a foregone conclusion ever since Democrats won the House in 2018. Some members, such as Rep. Al Green pictured above had joined the media in calling for Trump’s impeachment since before he was even inaugurated. The precise reasons keep changing (earlier this year, nearly 100 Democrats voted to impeach Trump for the high crime of criticizing Democratic lawmakers Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez on Twitter), but the fervor to retaliate against Trump for beating Hillary Clinton 2016 remains unchanged.
The theory behind the 2020 impeachment push is that Trump will be so damaged by the relentless onslaught of negative discussion about him that it will make voters elect someone else. And who knows? That might happen.
In practice, however, this particular impeachment push is becoming something of a worst-case political scenario for Democrats.
With much water carrying by the media, the current impeachment effort got as much help as imaginable when it was kicked off by Democrats in September. Several media outlets claimed a majority of Americans were completely on board with the plan to oust Trump and overturn the 2016 elections. With that generous media treatment of the topic, Pelosi was encouraged to get things going, even though she had previously cautioned against a purely partisan impeachment process. Not only have no Republicans fallen for the impeachment push, some Democrats joined Republicans in opposing it. Support for Pelosi’s investigation gambit was purely partisan, while its opposition was bipartisan.
After Rep. Adam Schiff’s hearings, which were widely if unenthusiastically watched, support for impeachment went down and opposition to impeachment went up. That was particularly true for the valued independent voters, the majority of whom oppose impeachment.
Democrats needed to start with a strong bipartisan push and then peel off Republican voters and members over the course of the inquiry, but that is not happening. And given the trajectory of polls over the last month, it’s only going to get worse for Democrats on that score, not better.
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