One would think that a president who lost the popular vote by a sizable margin and whose approval ratings have been underwater by roughly 10 percentage points since the day he was inaugurated would be rather easy to beat.
To the contrary, less than 11 months out from election day, Donald Trump's chances of being re-elected seem to be fairly high, almost certainly better than break-even.
A big part of that assessment, apart from the train wreck that is the Democratic primary field, is that the impeachment drive doesn't seem to be having much of an impact, or at least the kind of impact that all those "bombshell" revelations the media keep reporting would suggest.
At this point the only likely consequence, apart from a listing for Trump next to Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton in the history books, will be to force many of the Democratic contenders off the campaign trail at a crucial time in order to attend a Senate trial that has a foregone conclusion.
Impeachment has become a media obsession, but it is being tuned out by an increasingly bored public; indeed, a recent CNN poll listed impeachment last as a concern among eight possible issues for likely voters.
The summer of 1974 this isn't.
The irony is that Trump does things almost every day that could justify his removal (and the Ukrainian case, on balance of evidence, would seem to be one of those things), but the Democrats have no credibility on that score because voters know they've been looking for excuses to impeach him from the day he took office.
What Democrats never seem to realize is that support for Trump has always been correlated with the level of revulsion over their party and its behavior. The key to Trump's unlikely victory in 2016 was found in the awful alternative, not in Trump per se.
Little has changed since then--if voters don't trust Trump (and believe he is fully capable of doing lots of awful things), they trust the Democrats even less.
The "resistance" to Trump has been so hysterical now for so long that it's tarnished the very idea of political resistance. It no longer matters what accusations the Democrats and their media auxiliaries fling; they won't be taken seriously, even if they deserve to be. When everything Trump does is cause for outrage, nothing he does becomes outrageous any longer, even if it actually is. A certain numbness sets in amid the unrelenting fury and indignation.
Opinion has long since hardened on both sides. The voters know Trump's deficiencies and also know they will have the chance to act on that knowledge next November at the ballot box. As such, impeachment increasingly looks like just the latest tactic in the ongoing effort of sore losers to overturn 2016.
If impeachment is likely to turn out more liability than asset for Democrats in the short term (defined as the 2020 election cycle), its long-term consequences are likely to be even more damaging.
To grasp this, one must first understand that impeachment is the equivalent of a "nuclear option" in political disputes. Which means it should never be resorted to unless a clear majority of the public sees the transgressions in question as significant enough to warrant its use, lest the most serious of constitutional steps become simply a routine tactic of opposition.
There is, along such lines, considerable evidence that a majority of the public either fails to fully grasp the meaning of the Ukraine issue or grasps it and is less than overwhelmed by its impeachable content.
Second, impeachment is a truly awful idea unless there is at least a reasonable chance beforehand--found in some degree of bipartisan support--that it will result in removal from office.
The worst possible scenario for the integrity of the American constitutional order would be a straight-line partisan vote in the House to impeach and then a straight-line partisan vote to acquit in the Senate, with little doubt beforehand about that outcome.
But that is precisely where we find ourselves, and could have expected to from the beginning.
Third, and finally, impeachment is essentially a one-shot deal--if used unsuccessfully (as it is now about to be), it cannot by its very nature be used again with any credibility in response to a future, perhaps even more alarming abuse of power by the same president.
Hence, the nightmare scenario that Democrats seem to be pushing us toward--after the House votes to impeach and the Senate votes to acquit in straight party votes, a gloating Trump claims vindication and goes on to win re-election in largely the same way and for the same reasons as last time.
If Trump is truly the threat to our democratic order that Democrats claim, to the extent of justifying their efforts to remove him from office via impeachment, how would the kind of unbound and unconstrained Trump resulting from that scenario be less so? And with the threat of impeachment now taken off the table?
But at least Democrats will be able to pat themselves on the back for having "done the right thing."
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 12/09/2019