Impeachment, abortion, Obamacare: ‘Ticking time bombs’ one year before Election Day 2020

With barely any previous experience with impeachment, election analysts have struggled to gauge how it might impact the presidential race.

“We don’t really have any historical precedent because the last two times impeachment was on the table it was for Nixon and Clinton and they were both in their second terms,” said Kyle Kondik, a leading elections analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of “The Bellwether: Why Ohio Picks the President.”

Washington expects that Trump, like Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton before him, will likely be impeached by the House of Representatives and then acquitted by the Senate, which has a Republican majority.

But that legal victory might become an electoral setback, according to Rachel Bitecofer, assistant director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University. Bitecofer said she is using the contentious confirmation battle of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh shortly ahead of the 2018 midterm elections as a guide.

“There’s a misperception that in the 2018 election, the Kavanaugh fight ended up helping Republicans,” Bitecofer said. Based on her research, Kavanaugh’s confirmation was actually more likely to motivate Democrats to vote, she said.

“My expectation is that if Trump is acquitted, that Republicans will not be the beneficiaries of that,” she said.

Kondik suggested that even if there’s an acquittal, the details of the Senate vote could matter.

“Certainly the president would claim vindication. The Democrats would say he was saved by his own party,” he said. If there are Democrats who also vote to acquit, it could bolster the president’s case, he added.

The timeline for impeachment is not set in stone, though the process is moving quickly in the House. It is possible that a formal impeachment vote could be taken by the end of the year, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated that he intends for the trial to be swift. On Thursday, the House passed a resolution establishing rules for the public phase of the inquiry by a nearly party line vote of 232-196.

The first president to be impeached, Johnson, was not elected to a second term after failing to win his party’s nomination in 1868. The second, Clinton, saw his approval rating hit new highs after the proceedings started. Trump’s approval rating sits in the low 40s, and has proven to be unusually steady despite the frenetic pace of events in Washington.

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/02/election-day-2020-run-up-impeachment-abortion-obamacare.html