The water had been rising from the moment Democrats recaptured the House of Representatives. In September, the impeachment dam finally burst. Now there is no telling who will drown in the coming flood or even which political party will find itself most squarely in its path.
President Trump launched a full-court press against former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading Democratic presidential candidate. Trump has clearly calculated that exposing the Biden family’s dealings in Ukraine will either weaken the veteran Democrat as a general election opponent or sink him altogether, paving the way for a more liberal challenger. Meanwhile, Democrats have decided impeachment is a risk worth taking. Both parties are gambling, pushing all their chips to the middle of the table.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared herself “heartbroken” over her decision to launch an impeachment inquiry. “This is a very sad time for our country,” the California Democrat said. “There is no joy in this. We must be somber.” Among the activists upon which her young Democratic majority depends, however, Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib expresses the prevailing sentiment: “Impeach the motherf—er!”
Unlike the eager Democratic freshmen who see themselves as analogous to the 1974 “Watergate babies,” Pelosi was genuinely reluctant to go down this path. Her frame of reference is not the downfall of Richard Nixon, but rather the failed attempt to remove Bill Clinton 20 years ago. Republicans held the House and could impeach with a simple majority, but Democrats had the votes to deny them the two-thirds of the Senate required for a conviction.
If anything, the present breakdown on Capitol Hill makes impeachment look like even more of a dead end. Republicans control the Senate by a 53-47 margin, counting the two independents who caucus with the Democrats. Twenty GOP senators would need to join with every Democrat in the chamber to bounce Trump from office, almost certainly in an election year. Retiring Wisconsin Rep. James Sensenbrenner, a veteran of the 1998-99 impeachment fight, told a local news station, “I’m going to use that institutional memory basically to say they’re wasting the taxpayers’ time. There’s no way the Senate is going to kick Donald Trump out of office.”
Impeachment backfired on Republicans like Sensenbrenner and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham back then, arguably enhancing Clinton’s popularity. Pelosi kept this historical precedent in mind as she blocked Democrats from trying to impeach George W. Bush over the Iraq War during her first stint as speaker 12 years ago. She was set to do the same this time around, especially after special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia report and congressional testimony both fizzled. Pelosi’s hold on the speaker’s gavel relies more on suburban swing districts than on “the Resistance,” and some of those freshmen were noncommittal at best when it came to impeaching Trump. Polls showed impeachment had been unpopular.
The release of the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine’s president, followed by the declassified whistleblower report leveling multiple accusations of wrongdoing against Trump, made Pelosi’s position untenable. Impeachment had reached a tipping point among House Democrats. It is also not entirely clear that the 1990s or the late Bush years accurately predict how impeachment would play politically now.
Trump is more popular at this point than Bush 43 was in 2007, but his approval and favorability ratings are consistently lower than Clinton’s in the late 1990s. Democrats believe this gives impeachment room to grow in terms of public approval. There is a big difference between trying to impeach a president supported by about 60% of the electorate and one who regularly commands closer to 40%.
“So far, so good! There’s been approximately a 10% jump in support for impeachment since Speaker Pelosi announced the beginning of the inquiry,” said Brad Bannon, a Democratic strategist. “The Hill Harris X poll shows the increase was driven by a big surge of support for the process by political independents who are the key to the success of the effort.”
A late September Quinnipiac poll found a small majority (52%) supported an impeachment inquiry, while the public was split 47%-47% on whether Trump should be impeached and removed from office. The firm’s previous survey just days earlier found voters opposed to impeachment by a 20-point margin, 57% to 37%. Democratic opposition to impeachment collapsed from 21% (with 73% in favor) to just 5%, with 90% of Democrats pro-impeachment. Independents, once against impeachment 58%-34%, now oppose it by less than 10 percentage points.
Similarly, Morning Consult found a 13-point jump in support for impeachment the weekend after the Trump-Ukraine story broke. A CNN poll showed impeachment gaining 11 points among independents and even 8 points with Republicans. “The current level matches the high point for impeaching Trump in previous CNN polling,” writes Jennifer Agiesta, the network’s polling director.
The number that has Democrats salivating most came in a Sept. 24 YouGov poll finding 55% backing impeachment in response to this question: “If President Donald Trump suspended military aid to Ukraine in order to incentivize the country’s officials to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden, and his son, would you support or oppose impeachment?” This phrasing assumes things not yet proven but does reflect the case Democrats want to make against the president.
“The speaker’s insistence on focusing the inquiry on Ukraine is smart because the call rekindled concerns about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, and the attempt to cover up the call conjures images of Watergate,” said Bannon.
Which is another reason for Democratic optimism: While the Mueller report was a measured product reaching ambiguous conclusions, only released to the public after Attorney General William Barr’s “no collusion” summary, Democrats control the narrative with Ukraine and can go on the offensive. Pelosi has essentially taken the impeachment ball out of the House Judiciary Committee’s court after the panel’s chairman, New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, botched a hearing with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, with the speaker passing the effort to California Rep. Adam Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee.
Schiff has been inveighing against Trump on various matters since 2017 and, unlike Nadler, played no role in defending Clinton from impeachment. Schiff is ready to do battle over the whistleblower report and may know more about its contents than Mueller’s secretive investigation. The key is to get out ahead on Trump-Ukraine and other issues in the impeachment inquiry, creating damning headline after headline, before any complications or doubts take hold. Mueller was to some extent constrained by what he could prove in court, at least in terms of indicting Trump subordinates. House Democrats only have to convince each other, at least until a Senate trial.
That may be the Democrats’ theory for how impeachment can succeed, but there is no guarantee it will work. While Democrats can deliver a more searing case against Trump than Mueller was ever likely to, and do so with a lower burden of proof, they will not be viewed as neutral investigators by the rest of the country. Even the special counsel and his team came under scrutiny for anti-Trump bias — a political party actively committed to the president’s electoral defeat can’t plausibly deny the charge.
Among the House Democratic caucus, 40% have already voted to impeach Trump over mean tweets about liberal freshman congresswomen. Pelosi and California Rep. Maxine Waters have both called for Trump to be prosecuted, even incarcerated (Waters prefers “solitary confinement”), after he leaves office. Is there any realistic doubt about what an inquiry led by such people will find? Both the country’s political divide and the media landscape — gone are the days of just three television networks — are radically different than during the Watergate hearings.
“If Democrats do indeed impeach Trump, independent swing-state voters might see this as nothing more than Democrats ‘crying wolf’ again (Mueller report, Brett Kavanaugh, etc.) and thus engaging in a partisan exercise to appease a rabid base who just refuses to accept Trump as a legitimate president,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “Then Trump will not only be reelected in 2020, but the House will be in play as well when it wasn’t before this ordeal. The GOP needs to net 19 seats and 12 House Dems are still against impeachment.”
While the polls appear to be moving toward impeachment now, these numbers have fluctuated before. Trump always looks weakest in the immediate aftermath of a major controversy or setback, such as losing Iowa, the Access Hollywood tape, the Trump Tower meeting, Charlottesville, the Helsinki press conference, “s—hole countries,” “send them back,” and numerous supposed Trump-Russia bombshell stories. But like a death-defying political Houdini, he recovers over time. Action-packed hearings with star witnesses and a steady flow of negative news stories could further erode Trump’s standing. Or, like so many times before, the fever could break and the public will move on.
One unusual feature of the Trump-Ukraine issue is that Biden could be collateral damage. Trump has been looking into Biden’s dealings with Ukraine, where his son Hunter Biden set up a lucrative business seemingly trading on his father’s power and influence. While Democrats refer to this as soliciting foreign “dirt” on a political rival, others may ask whether there is any merit to the allegations against the Bidens.
In going after both the Bidens and the origins of the Russia investigation, Trump is taking a risk, calculated or otherwise. He wants to reset the narrative about who really represents Washington corruption, deal a deathblow to the less flattering parts of the Mueller report, and reestablish himself as a drainer of the swamp ahead of the general election. But without his aggressive involvement in pressing foreign governments to cooperate with these plans, he would have likely avoided an impeachment inquiry. Trump is risking his presidency in order to save it.
Biden has widely been viewed as the strongest potential Democratic presidential nominee.
“The big winner here is Elizabeth Warren, who is surging in the polls,” said O’Connell. “In fact, Warren has to be downright giddy. She gets to scream about Trump and pretend to defend Biden while privately hoping the entire ordeal brings about Biden’s political demise — and possibly even Trump’s.”
Indeed, Biden found his name in the headlines alongside Trump right as Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, was gaining. The current RealClearPolitics polling average has Warren only slightly behind Biden nationally and in New Hampshire, where a late September Monmouth poll found her leading, and ahead of the former vice president in Iowa. Fox Business reported that Biden is already bracing for Iowa and New Hampshire defeats while hoping to hit back at Warren on Super Tuesday.
Biden could benefit from being the perceived victim in a Trump scandal. He has rebutted the charges related to his son with more vigor than he has mustered on almost anything else during this primary campaign. Being a Trump target could easily produce a rallying effect among Democrats. Biden says Trump is focused on him because “he knows I can beat him like a drum,” helping his electability argument. And the political press, chastened by the last campaign, may hesitate to let the Biden-Ukraine story become the 2020 version of Hillary Clinton’s emails, no matter where it leads.
At the same time, Democrats have already lost one presidential race to Trump because their nominee couldn’t win the corruption argument against him. They may be reluctant to make it two. The anti-Hillary playbook that worked, however narrowly, in 2016 is most easily replicable against Biden, who Trump called “stone-cold crooked” in an Oct. 2 press conference. And while the anti-Biden animus on the Right is weaker and of a more recent vintage than decades of opposition to Hillary Clinton, it took a campaign to drive her negatives as high as Trump’s. There is no question Republicans will try to do it again if Biden is the nominee, and there is at least some chance the impeachment inquiry will actually help them do so.
A September Monmouth poll asked registered voters if they shared Trump’s suspicions about the Bidens: “President Trump claims Joe Biden put pressure on Ukrainian officials to get them to not investigate his son’s business dealings there. Do you think Biden probably did or probably did not do this?” More thought the answer was that Biden probably did, a split of 42%-37%. Given the media coverage on this, the numbers have to bother Democrats.
Even if the Democrats look for a different presidential nominee, the candidates currently serving in Congress, especially the senators, will have to devote time to impeachment that could more profitably be spent focusing on the campaign. Issues Democrats would like to raise could also get drowned out by House hearings and a Senate trial. Democrats will need to pursue impeachment in a way that motivates their base without alienating swing voters.
“Democrats can’t forget that the winning formula for the 2018 midterms was to focus on healthcare. It remains the No. 1 issue to voters, and the GOP is going down the same repeal Obamacare rabbit hole, which hurt them at the ballot box,” said Democratic strategist Jessica Tarlov. “A continual emphasis on healthcare while explaining, especially in swing districts, that impeachment is about upholding the Constitution should keep congressional Democrats in office. A corrupt president is a threat to the republic and can be used to motivate just like the typical election issues that motivate voters.”
But that level of message discipline can be difficult to maintain. “The Democrats’ claim that they can walk and chew gum legislatively while conducting an impeachment inquiry is beyond laughable,” O’Connell said. “When you pursue impeachment in the manner and speed with which the Democrats are, the entire political world comes to a grinding halt.”
Some say that’s why Pelosi might fast-track impeachment and kick it over to Mitch McConnell’s Senate as quickly as possible.
A great deal remains unknown. Most lawmakers already knew whether they regarded Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky-related perjury as impeachable or not before the crucial votes. The same was true of Bush’s Iraq War conduct as Pelosi was keeping antiwar Democrats at bay. We don’t know all of the allegations that are going to come out against Trump, much less the facts surrounding them.
Then there is the unpredictability of the president and other key players such as former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Will comments by either Trump or Giuliani swing public opinion? Will administration officials corroborate the whistleblower report, making it a more credible document than the Steele dossier? Will Republican senators lose their patience with Trump’s tweets about treason — not a term he should want to see defined during this saga — and decide they are better off with Mike Pence? Or will Democrats overreach? What will Mitt Romney do?
“There are certainly political risks for both sides, and nobody is entirely sure how this is going to play out,” said a Trump-friendly Republican insider. “I can sit here and tell you that Trump didn’t abuse his power, there was no quid pro, no campaign finance violations as DOJ has said, and that Dems have been doing this since 2016 in Ukraine. But really, it is all in the hands of the persuadable voters.”
Trump and Pelosi are playing their hands to the end.
W. James Antle III is the editor of the American Conservative.
