Pelosi’s party shouldn’t be afraid of impeachment, history suggests
Welcome to 2020 Vision, the Yahoo News column covering the presidential race with one smart, fast takeaway every weekday and a deeper roundup every weekend. Reminder: There are 129 days until the Iowa caucuses and 403 days until the 2020 election.
For months, this had been House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s rationale for resisting. Yes, the Democratic Party flipped 41 House seats in 2018, enough to regain control of the chamber. But those gains mean that in 2020, dozens of her members will be defending closely divided or even Republican-leaning districts, including 31 that Trump won in 2016.
Recall the Clinton impeachment. Much has been made of the fact that in November 1998, a month after the GOP majority first voted to authorize the impeachment inquiry, Democrats flipped five seats in the House — the first time since 1834 that a president’s party gained House seats in the sixth year of his term. The narrative has long been that Dems were boosted by backlash to impeachment.
In other words, Democrats had a much more popular president on their team and a much bigger pool of vulnerable Republicans to target — and they still failed to flip the House. Even if Trump’s impeachment turns out to be as unpopular as Clinton’s — a strictly partisan spectacle, in the eyes of the public — there’s little reason to assume Democrats will suffer devastating electoral consequences as a result.
The differences between now and then are obvious. Again, partisanship is much more potent now; voters are a lot less moveable. Nixon had just won reelection; Trump intends to be the ballot next November. Back then, a global oil crisis was triggering a recession; today, unemployment is low and the economy seems strong.
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