After Action Report: Impeachment Was a Total Disaster for Democrats

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, accompanied by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of Calif. and other congress members speaks during a news conference on Trump Putin Helsinki Summit at Capitol Hill in Washington on Tuesday, July 17, 2018. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Just a short time ago, President Trump was acquitted of both articles of impeachment in the Senate. This brought the end to four months of partisan rancor and media idiocy. The only thing left to do is assign the winners and losers. On that topic, one thing is clear – Impeachment has been an unmitigated disaster for Democrats.

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Molly Hemingway over at The Federalist lays that case out in her typical expert fashion, citing three areas in which the left ended up paying a price.

The first being that Trump is now more popular than he was before impeachment. And the jump isn’t small, it’s pretty massive.

The latest Gallup poll of registered voters shows that Trump’s approval rating is the highest it’s been since his inauguration — 49 percent. That number went up from 39 percent in October, which was during the House’s impeachment process, such as it was.

During that same time, approval of the Democratic Party fell from 48 percent to 45 percent and approval of the Republican Party shot up from 43 percent to 51 percent. That’s the first time the GOP has had majority approval since 2005. The party also has a rare partisan-ID advantage.

Not only was Trump helped by the show Democrats put on, but the Republican party as a whole was. That will have a lasting impact going into 2020, although there’s still plenty of time for the picture to be scrambled. For the moment, though, the GOP has a wave of momentum they haven’t seen since 2016. It’s reminiscent of Barack Obama’s turnaround in early-mid 2012 (which was helped along by Mitt Romney being an awful candidate).

Mollie also notes that this has indeed hurt Joe Biden far more than Trump, something that was long speculated could happen.

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Democrats alleged that the concerns President Trump expressed amounted to 2020 election interference requiring immediate removal from office. But no one ever offered a non-corrupt explanation for the Biden family’s lucrative entanglement in Ukraine, making the argument much more difficult.

Biden’s fall from grace is now coming into focus, as he’s just lost Iowa big and is poised to get smacked in New Hampshire as well. If he doesn’t manage to win Nevada, his campaign is over. For all the talk about how pointless it was for Trump to care about what Biden was doing in Ukraine, there’s no doubt the revelations about Biden’s son and Burisma have rightly hurt his campaign.

Lastly, Mollie brings up the fact that this has galvanized Republican voters in a way not seen since the Brett Kavanaugh debacle.

As with the anti-Kavanaugh smear operation, things turned in Republicans’ favor and against Democrats, and the media only when they showed unity in the face of the coordinated campaign.

The unfairness of that operation also made Republican senators wake up to the need to fight back and fight hard. Voters now demand a strength in their senators that they were previously able to avoid showing. This is the position of maximum strength for Republicans, and was only made possible by how poor the Democratic operation was.

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Mitt Romney did predictably break rank and vote to convict, but outside of his typical glory hogging political machinations, the Republicans as a whole unified against the stupidity of the impeachment push. Even Trump critics like Elise Stefanik couldn’t sit idly by and let this farce go unanswered. In the end, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski voted to acquit as well despite plenty of cover for them to convict if they wanted to. What that says is that the opposition to impeachment wasn’t purely partisan but was principled push back on a Democrat party that was clearly abusing its power.

A lot can change between now and November 2020. But the energy coming out of this impeachment fiasco is real for the Republican party. It needs to be harnessed and used for all it’s worth.

 

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