A Year Later, Impeachment Did House Democrats No Favors

One year ago today, Donald Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives. The outcome was foreordained: Nobody thought at the time that there were 20 Republican senators who would vote to convict. We can argue forever about whether the Senate should have removed Trump and how 2020 and the election would have been different with Mike Pence in charge, but as I argued here and here, with no clear-cut criminal offense, the voters evenly divided, and a presidential election impending, it was entirely in line with the design and history of our system for the Senate to acquit and let the voters decide if Trump was truly unfit for office — which, in the end, is what they did.

In the House, only four members bucked party lines; in the Senate, only one. The lone House Republican to vote for impeachment, Justin Amash, left the party to become a Libertarian, and did not run again. The lone House Democrat to vote “present,” Tulsi Gabbard, was a presidential also-ran and did not run again for her House seat, either. One of the two Democrats to vote no, Jeff Van Drew, switched parties and was reelected as a Republican; the other, Collin Peterson, lost reelection after three decades in a House district that has turned increasingly red. The lone senator to buck his party, Mitt Romney, does not face the voters again until 2024.

Did impeachment hurt Trump? It was massively overshadowed by the yearlong COVID-19 pandemic and the George Floyd riots. The narrow margin of Trump’s loss in the key states, and the large turnout of voters for Trump, suggests that impeachment did not have the devastating political effect of Democratic dreams. On the other hand, with Trump losing the election by less than a point each in three key states, one could plausibly tie his defeat to almost anything that did him any damage. Impeachment over Trump’s dirt-digging in Ukraine plainly did not deter him from continuing to pursue stories about Hunter Biden’s involvement with the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, but one might argue that casting the search for that evidence as a presidential high crime helped persuade media outlets to steer a wide berth from reporting on it. Still, presidential impeachment is supposed to be about something more substantial than working the media refs.

If you look at the three prior impeachments (Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson being impeached by the House and acquitted by the Senate, Richard Nixon resigning after impeachment passed the House Judiciary Committee), the impeached party lost the White House in the next election — with an asterisk for Johnson, a Democrat who had been elected vice president on a Republican ticket and was succeeded by another Republican. In each case, the winner was someone from the other party who was safely outside of Congress during the impeachment: George W. Bush in 2000 and Jimmy Carter in 1976 had both been governors, while Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 had been a general, and pointedly removed himself as Johnson’s choice for secretary of war when it became clear that the removal of the prior secretary of war would be at the center of an impeachment fight. Joe Biden, like Grant, was unavoidably involved in the controversy that led to impeachment, but he prevailed in the primaries over Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and other congressional Democrats who were in the fray.

If you look at the election returns in Congress, the voters have tended to have a more pox-on-both-houses approach, which suggests the political foolishness of Nancy Pelosi’s caucus picking this particular fight. In 1998, with impeachment about to happen, Republicans expected midterm gains in the House; instead, they lost five seats, lost two more in 2000, and did not really regain their footing until the post-9/11 midterm in 2002. In the Senate, Republicans gained no ground in 1998, lost four seats in 2000, and lost the majority due to a party switch in the spring of 2001. George W. Bush campaigned on restoring honor and dignity to the White House, but also on being a different kind of Republican from the people who impeached Clinton, defeating John McCain (who had voted to convict) in the primary. John Kerry, who voted to acquit Clinton, lost his presidential bid in 2004; so did McCain in 2008, and so did Clinton’s vice president in 2000 and Clinton’s wife in 2016.

In 1868 as well, Republicans lost four seats in the House (although the 20-seat Democratic gain was largely due to readmitting Confederate states rather than flipping seats). The exception was 1974, the one time the president folded rather than contest impeachment: Dispirited Republicans were routed in the 1974 midterms, losing 48 House seats and four Senate seats. By 1976, however, Carter’s victory over Ford was accompanied mostly by a stalemate: a gain of one House seat for Democrats, and one Senate seat for Republicans.

This year, in the Senate, the wave of revulsion at Republicans who voted to acquit Trump never materialized: The acquittal vote may have sealed the doom of Cory Gardner in blue Colorado, and the conviction vote may have done the same for Doug Jones in red Alabama, but otherwise, pending the Georgia runoffs, only one incumbent lost (Martha McSally in Arizona, who had also lost in 2018), and high Democratic hopes of taking out Susan Collins, Thom Tillis, and Joni Ernst were dashed. And in the House, it was a surprisingly ugly year for Democrats, who have lost ten or eleven seats. It is impossible to see this as the happy ending that many Democrats expected a year ago.

One hopes, as Fred Lucas suggests on the homepage, that the recurrence of political failure of impeachment — failing to immediately remove the president, harming the congressional party that tries to do so — will lead both parties to step back from using the device unless we see again the conditions of the Nixon impeachment (where the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon only after building public support that hit two-thirds approval in polls). But then, partisans failing to learn from history is itself an American tradition.