Trump Bets Impeachment Threat Will Boost Midterms Turnout

Donald Trump spoke at a sort of pep rally for House Republicans on Tuesday as part of an effort to get the lawmakers locked and loaded for a year focused on an uphill effort to maintain GOP control of that chamber in the November midterms. He knows, and they know, that history and his own chronically underwater job-approval ratings make continued House control a poor bet at best. But in addressing them, he didn’t entirely focus on the cool stuff Republicans could do together in 2027 if they hung onto their fragile governing trifecta. Instead, he warned of a terrible thing that could happen if the Democrats flip the House, as NBC News reports:

President Donald Trump had a warning for Republicans on Tuesday: If they don’t retain control of Congress in this year’s midterm elections, Democrats will impeach him again.

“You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be — I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump said in a speech at a House Republican policy retreat. “I’ll get impeached.”

This “warning” isn’t just a matter of Trump being self-absorbed (though self-absorption is definitely an element in everything he says and does). It seems Republicans have decided to make the threat of a third Trump impeachment a major get-out-the-vote talking point for the midterms, as NBC News reported back in July:

Seldom do sitting presidents pick up seats in midterm congressional elections. Trump faces an especially daunting challenge in that he relies on a devoted electoral base that may feel no compelling reason to vote if his name isn’t on the ballot.

One way to persuade Trump supporters to turn out is to press the point that he could face impeachment a third time if Democrats wrest control of the House in November 2026, the GOP operatives said.

The message to Trump’s loyal following is a simple one: If you like Trump and want to protect him from an avenging Democratic majority, vote Republican.

Impeachment “will be the subtext of everything we do, whether it’s said overtly or not,” said a senior Republican strategist who is involved in congressional races and speaks to Trump.

So in bringing it up today, Trump is “overtly” addressing this “subtext,” in hopes that Republicans ape his pitch and help marginal 2024 Trump voters rouse themselves to defend their hero in non-presidential elections they might otherwise skip.

It’s an interesting ploy, perhaps inspired by the distant memory of a 1998 midterm election in which Democrats became the first presidential party to make midterm gains in House seats since the early days of the New Deal. This shocker was widely attributed to the preoccupation of Newt Gingrich’s House Republicans with preparations for the impeachment of Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal and its aftermath. But there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical that this is a replicable event.

First, Democrats did well in the 1998 midterms in no small part because the economy was booming and Clinton’s job-approval ratings were regularly over 60 percent. Whatever you think of the economy right now, it’s at best a mixed bag, and Trump has never sniffed 60 percent approval ratings in his entire career. Second, while Democrats made House gains, they didn’t control the chamber either before or after the 1998 election, so it was a lower-stakes election. Third, the Republicans of 1998 had unquestionably earned an extremist reputation vis-à-vis the Democrats of 1998, as reflected in Clinton’s easy 1996 reelection.

But there’s a fourth differentiator that may be most important: Republicans were eager to impeach Clinton going into the 1998 midterms, and after. (Indeed, they went on to impeach the 42nd president the month after those despite their poor performance.) While of course there will be House Democrats who want to impeach Trump on general principles every single day he’s in office, it’s very unlikely to be a priority for a Speaker Hakeem Jeffries if Democrats do flip the House in November. For one thing, Speaker Jeffries will have a slender margin of control that probably wouldn’t sustain articles of impeachment even if he wanted to pursue them. But if he wants to go there, he and other House Democratic leaders are not about to engage in an impeachment crusade during the midterm campaign given all the evidence that focusing on issues like “affordability” and health care are the ticket to success.

One reason Republicans decided to impeach Clinton was that there was momentarily a possibility he might be convicted by the Senate and removed from office, or he might be convinced to resign. By and large, Democrats did not defend his misconduct, and many backed a formal censure. Today’s Democrats know for a fact (having tried it twice) that even the most compelling evidence of presidential wrongdoing, such as the shocking insurrectionary conduct Trump committed almost exactly five years ago, will not convince a sufficient number of Senate Republicans to abandon him. So Democrats aren’t going to do Trump’s party the favor of handing it a great distraction of a campaign issue.

Beyond the essential phoniness of the phantom impeachment-and-removal threat, the assumption that 2024 Trump voters can to be compelled to rush to his aid in 2026 is questionable. Midterm electorates are invariably smaller than presidential electorates because many voters routinely skip everything other than presidential elections. Believing “their” president is in peril won’t necessarily change that. More importantly, there’s abundant evidence that a lot of those marginal Trump 2024 voters aren’t so happy with him now; herding them to the polls might even backfire.

We can assume the president thoroughly enjoys making a congressional election all about himself. But voters need a more salient issue than protecting Trump from a doomed impeachment bid that probably won’t even begin to happen.