As Democrats race toward impeaching President Trump, evidence suggests that they have failed to make their case to voters. Though this has heightened hopes among Republicans that the impeachment gambit may backfire against Democrats in 2020, if recent political history is any indication, it probably will not have much effect by next November.
When Bill Clinton was impeached, it seemed to backfire on Republicans in the short term, with his approval rating hitting 73% — the peak of his presidency. Yet in 2000, Republicans took back the White House and retained control of the House of Representatives until 2006, when control flipped because of the protracted Iraq War.
A more recent example would be the Republican attempt to defund Obamacare that triggered a government shutdown in the fall of 2013. Like impeachment, the defund effort was instigated by the party’s base and forced the House to adopt a position that had zero chance of succeeding in a Senate controlled by the president’s party.
At the time, polls showed that a solid majority of Americans opposed shutting down the government over an attempt to defund Obamacare. As the impasse dragged on, the public overwhelmingly blamed Republicans.
Chris Cillizza, the barometer of Washington conventional wisdom, warned at the time that Republicans were “watching their brand take a major hit.”
A CNN headline declared, “Republican shutdown pain may boost Dems in 2014.” The story reported that “non-partisan political handicappers say the likelihood of Democrats winning the House and maintaining control in the Senate in 2014 has increased” as a result of the backlash.
“Republicans have ratcheted up their risk,” Stuart Rothenberg, editor of The Rothenberg Political Report, was quoted as saying. “There is now a plausible case for the midterms being a plus for the Democrats, where I would never said that six months ago.”
He said that the GOP was now being seen as “a chaotic, disorganized, confused party” and “big-dollar donors, who are more pragmatic business types, are now worried about where the party is going.” He predicted it would help Democrats, “in recruitment, in fundraising, and in overall morale.”
Yet the following November, Republicans gained nine Senate seats to take the majority and added a net of 13 seats in the House, giving the party its largest majority since 1928.
This isn’t to say that the defund effort fueled those gains. But the narrative in the fall of 2013 that the shutdown showed Republicans were a chaotic party that couldn’t be trusted in power certainly did not prevent them from making major gains a year later.
I imagine voters will shrug off impeachment similarly in 2020.
Right now, the polling is less conclusively against Democrats than 2013 polling was against Republicans. Trump’s approval rating has barely budged during the impeachment process, seeing neither the cratering in support that Richard Nixon saw during the Watergate investigations or the surge in support that Clinton saw during his impeachment. The country is largely divided on impeachment, as they are on Trump. Even if polling indicates impeachment is less popular in swing states, just because a given voter says in a poll taken in Dec. 2019 that he opposes removing Trump through impeachment, doesn’t mean that person will vote for Trump next November or base his Congressional vote on the impeachment issue.
Given the velocity of political news in the Trump era, my best guess is the impeachment saga will be folded into people’s overall impressions about Trump and will be supplanted by hundreds of controversies of various degrees of significance in the next 11-ish months. In the end, it will have very little effect on the outcome of the election.
