Joe Biden’s polling surge after announcing his presidential run has uprooted assumptions about the ideological nature of the Democratic electorate in a way that reinforces the decision by House Democratic leaders to avoid impeaching President Trump.

Right now, liberals are engaged in a debate over the merits of impeaching Trump, even as they broadly agree that he is corrupt and should be subjected to aggressive oversight by Democrats. Generally, there are three camps. One view, which has been basically adopted by Democratic leaders, is that impeachment would be unpopular and pointless given Republican control of the Senate, and could even distract from efforts to hold Trump accountable. Jonathan Bernstein made this case at Bloomberg recently. A more middle-ground view has been pushed by Greg Sargent at the Washington Post, who has urged Democrats to at least open up an impeachment inquiry, arguing that it would give more legal weight to their oversight requests in the ongoing standoff with Trump over testimony and documents. Then of course there’s the “impeach the mother f—er” school. On this front, Crooked’s Brian Beutler has made the case that by effectively taking impeachment off the table, Democrats have greenlighted more brazen bad behavior from Trump.