Republicans plan to use the threat of impeachment as a key midterm issue
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. The strategist, like others in this article, was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
John McLaughlin, a Trump pollster, said: 'The Trump voters are happy and complacent right now. And we have to get them fired up for next year. We have a lot of work to do. If President Trump is not on the ballot, it's harder to get them out.'
'We know what the stakes are in the midterm elections,' he added. 'If we don't succeed, Democrats will begin persecuting President Trump again. They would go for impeachment.'
As they workshop midterm campaign messages, Democratic leaders are making the opposite calculation. They've concluded impeachment is a losing issue. Through bitter experience, they've seen that impeaching Trump has neither driven him from power nor crippled him politically.
Two previous Democratic-led impeachment efforts failed to garner the two-thirds Senate majority needed to convict Trump. Despite those proceedings and a quartet of criminal indictments after he lost the 2020 election, Trump remained sufficiently viable to win again in '24.
'You've got to be careful: You're liable to make him a martyr,' former Rep. Bob Brady, chairman of the Philadelphia Democratic Party, said in an interview.
Today, many Democratic leaders say they see impeachment as a distraction from bread-and-butter issues that may have more success in mobilizing voters — chiefly, the cost of living.
'The No. 1 thing that folks want to hear about is what are you doing to lower costs. That's been our top focus,' Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an interview Wednesday.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who was the Democrats' lead manager in impeaching Trump over the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, said his party's focus is Trump's 'terrible agenda' — not impeachment.
'We've already impeached him twice,' Raskin said. 'So obviously that's not a complete solution, given that he is able to beat the two-thirds constitutional spread. So I don't think anybody thinks that's going to be the utopian solution to our problems.'
Despite those demurrals, Republicans take it as a given that Democrats will move to impeach Trump anew if they capture the House.
'The Democrats are so moronic and crackbrained they never learn from their mistakes,' said Steven Cheung, the White House director of communications. 'Instead of actually working for the American people, they are so consumed and obsessed with destroying this country because they suffer from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted their pea-sized brains.'
While there is no plausible scenario in which Democrats gain the supermajority needed for conviction in the Senate, impeachment would be a distraction that impedes his agenda in the back half of his term, Republicans said.
'Yeah, impeachment is a concern for the president, and it's a concern for all of us,' said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a Trump ally.
A Republican strategist involved in Senate races said, 'It's not only the threat of impeachment; it's the idea that the administration won't be able to get anything done for the American people because all the Democrats will be focused on is impeachment.'
Republican campaigns will use mailings and text messages to push out that point, targeting voters who might otherwise sit out the midterms, the person said.
Trump ultimately sets the tone for his party, and GOP operatives said they don't want to front-run him by marshaling the impeachment argument on their own. But Trump has deployed it in the past.
Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, he also raised the specter of impeachment. Trump told supporters in Montana that year that if he were to get impeached, 'it's your fault, because you didn't get out to vote.'
Democrats wound up winning back the House, but Republicans kept control of the Senate.
So far in Trump's second term, congressional Democrats have been impeachment-curious but wary of going all-in. In May, Democratic leaders dissuaded Rep. Shri Thanedar, D-Mich., from moving forward with plans to seek to impeach Trump. He had sponsored a resolution that accused Trump of a litany of 'high crimes and misdemeanors,' including his threat to annex Greenland, punishment of private law firms and imposition of tariffs.
Last month, Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, forced an impeachment vote that wound up failing. Democratic leaders helped defeat Green's measure, which sought to oust Trump for launching attacks on Iran without congressional approval.
Some Democratic pollsters said there's no need for the party to be so tentative. A party leadership that persists in calling Trump an existential threat to democracy shouldn't shy away from impeachment as a solution, they contend.
Surveys and focus groups suggest that impeachment could, indeed, galvanize Democratic voters who don't feel motivated to vote next year, they added.
'One of our biggest problems is the people who are dissatisfied with what is happening under Trump feel they can't do anything and often feel Democrats aren't doing anything,' said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster.
Impeachment, she added, 'suggests we can do something: We can make a statement, we can stand up, we can fight.'
'And in that sense, it's a motivator.'
A survey at the end of May by Research Collaborative, a strategy group for progressive causes, asked likely voters who disapprove of Trump how they'd like to see Democratic leaders resist his administration and policies.
A whopping 86% wanted to articles of impeachment introduced, compared with 14% who said they didn't favor impeachment.
'Voters who are open to voting for Democrats are saying consistently that they want Democrats to match their actions to their words and use every tool available to them to fight the MAGA agenda, including impeachment,' said Tara Buss, senior director of research at the collaborative.
'They want Democrats to stand up and fight,' she added. 'They feel that they're under attack and impeachment is quite literally the only constitutional remedy that can stop the attack.'
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
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