I mean... one thing that will *probably* be true is that people looking back on the 2020 election in hindsight will attribute more significance to impeachment than it actually had on the outcome.
I don't mean to suggest that impeachment will have *no* impact. But:
1) The effects will likely be hard to tease out;
2) Trump creates an awful lot of news so voters have a lot to weigh aside from impeachment;
3) It's not clear what baseline we're comparing against.
1) The effects will likely be hard to tease out;
2) Trump creates an awful lot of news so voters have a lot to weigh aside from impeachment;
3) It's not clear what baseline we're comparing against.
By 3) I mean it's not as though impeachment was some exogenous shock that came out of nowhere. Nobody should really be surprised by Trump's behavior. No one should be surprised that Republicans defended him. No one should be surprised that the D base pressured Pelosi to impeach.
So it all feels quite *inevitable* at least from the moment Ds won the House. If you were projecting paths from Nov. '18 on, this one—Trump is impeached (not removed) along partisan lines on somewhat narrow grounds related to abuses of power—would almost be the median/modal case.
