re: USPOL
@natecull That impeaching Bill Clinton led to the unusual situation where the President's party actually *gained* seats in the midterms. There's usually a backlash, but the midterm elections right after the impeachment pretty much sucked for the Republicans. The impeachment was in october, elections in november. The election that people think about in terms of the effects of that impeachment was 1998, not 2000.
No idea whether either 1998 or 2000 are actually relevant to 2020 in any way, but that's what people are talking about if they talk about Clinton's impeachment.
re: USPOL
@natecull I don't think there's any subtle logic there. Politics is IMO too unpredictable for subtle calculus to work. There's two main arguments that I hear:
1) impeachment in 1998 led to losses in 1998, and so impeachment now would likely lead to losses in the next election.
2) Democrats made big gains in 2018 by focusing on health care and not negative campaigning against Trump, and that should be the strategy in 2020; impeachment does not support that.
I think that discussion is unrelated Trump being an existential threat. Trump being an existential threat makes it SUPER IMPORTANT that the Democrats get the strategy right, but it doesn't really inform what the correct strategy is.
I'm all in favor of impeachment because it's the right thing to do, but I'm not going to pretend I know whether it would help or hurt electoral chances...
re: USPOL
@ftl @natecull it is also worth noting that the 2000 election was decided by the Supreme Court along partisan lines not by an election.