Republicans Are Talking About Impeachment Way More Than Democrats

“Legal blows fuel impeachment fears” declared Politico in a headline on Tuesday, after news broke that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen had entered a guilty plea and a jury had convicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on eight counts of various financial crimes. The story featured three Republicans (and no Democrats) speculating about the possibility of Democrats impeaching President Trump if they win control of the House in November. On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggested that impeachment is, “the only message they seem to have going into the midterms,” referring to congressional Democrats. Even Trump himself appears to have impeachment on the mind.

Here’s the thing: If the Democrats are planning to impeach Trump if they win control of the House, they are doing a really great job of hiding it. Congressional Democrats aren’t talking about impeachment.

On Wednesday, for example, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, a leading candidate for speaker of the House if Democrats win control, again all but ruled out an impeachment push, saying that Democrats would use congressional power to oversee the Trump administration and make sure the president does not interfere with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, where any impeachment resolutions would likely be introduced, spent Wednesday pushing a bill he sponsored that would make it harder for Trump to fire Mueller. Nadler has suggested that the party will only pursue impeachment if they think they can get the 67 Senate votes they’d need to remove Trump from office — a very high bar, since that would mean something like 17 Senate Republicans would agree to vote out a Republican president.

And it’s not just Democratic leaders who aren’t talking about impeachment. As part of FiveThirtyEight’s project looking at what types of Democrats are doing well in primaries for Senate, House and governor this year, we looked at the campaign website for each of the 811 people who, as of Aug. 7, had appeared on the ballot in Democratic primaries for races with no Democratic incumbent. Only one candidate (Nate Kleinman, running for a House seat in New Jersey) featured a call for impeaching Trump on his website. And he lost his primary, getting just 9 percent of the vote in a four-way race.1 And the latest Cohen and Manafort developments haven’t seemed to bring a surge of calls for impeachment, either. For example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the party’s nominee in a very Democratic-leaning House district in New York City and a new hero of the left wing of the Democratic Party, has sent out several tweets since the news about Cohen and Manafort — none of which mentioned impeachment.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/republicans-are-talking-about-impeachment-way-more-than-democrats/

Paranoia I guess