Reading Cameron Stewart’s coverage of the Trump impeachment hearings, as I’ve previously written, has been like tuning into broadcasts from another planet. Stewart breathlessly reported on “devastating” “bombshells” – even as one Democrat witness after another was reduced to admitting that they either had no grounds at all or, at best, third-and-fourth-hand hearsay, to claim that the President had done anything even vaguely unethical, let alone actually illegal.
But, as the whole sorry affair moves on to the US Senate, even Cameron Stewart is beginning dimly to suspect that the whole thing might just be about to explode in the Democrats’ faces.
After its initial victory at Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japan went on to lose the war.
Could it also be that after their political victory in impeaching Trump, the Democrats now will go on to lose next year’s election? After one of the most dramatic weeks of Trump’s presidency, all sides of politics are trying to gauge the likely fallout from the third presidential impeachment in US history.
Trump describes impeachment as a “a political suicide march for the Democratic Party”.
He is convinced it will galvanise his support base and possibly even enlarge it, delivering him a second term in the White House.
Trump is almost certainly right. There is a palpable sense of white-hot fury among conservative voters. Even the Republican party, which has been ambivalent (at best) about Trump from the very start, is standing firm behind their president.
Given Stewart’s skewed grasp of reality during the impeachment hearings, it’s not surprising that he continues to get basic facts wrong.
But Trump’s impeachment takes him into uncharted territory politically.
The other two impeached presidents, Bill Clinton (1998) and Andrew Johnson (1868), were impeached in their second terms and neither went on to fight another election.
Johnson only served one term. He was also re-elected to the Senate in 1875 – the only former president ever to do so.
There’s a key difference between Clinton and Trump, too. Clinton was a Swamp monster through-and-through. Trump is a Washington outsider, for all his patrician background, a man of the people. Trump is using his most devastating weapons, Twitter and his whistle-stop campaign rallies, to drum up support. When Trump turns to the people to take the fight to the Washington Swamp, he wins.
Stewart is also missing or misrepresenting another key fact:
If impeachment is not changing the minds of voters now, it is hard to see how it will resonate 10 months from now when the election is held.
But the polls so far also show the backlash against Democrats that Trump has predicted has not yet come to pass.
This is nonsense. Voters have, in fact, changed their minds already. Early in the impeachment proceedings, voters favoured impeachment by 51% to 39% against. Support has already dropped considerably. Polls now show Americans either 50/50 or slightly against removing the president from office. Should the Senate decide to conduct a trial, the spectacle of Democrats like Biden being grilled over their links to dodgy doings in Ukraine would surely harden opinion further.
More importantly, as even Stewart is realising, Trump is gaining considerable support where it matters.
Although the national polls have stayed steady [not true, as shown above], in the key battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida, opposition to impeachment is higher than it is nationally. If impeachment delivers an electoral boost to Trump in these key states, it may well deliver him the election.
There are also signs that impeachment has fired up Trump’s support base, even if it is not reflected in the polls. According to Axios, since impeachment proceedings began 600,000 new donors have contributed to the Republican National Committee…
theaustralian.com.au/commentary/democrats-may-have-blown-themselves-out-of-the-water/news-story/
[Democrats] have impeached Trump but have failed to turn public opinion against him as they had hoped. It is early days, but impeachment may yet turn out to be their Pearl Harbor.