When the U.S. House of Representatives impeached Donald J. Trump on Wednesday, he joined an exclusive club that includes only two other presidents, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. We’ve been talking about a Trump impeachment since before he was even elected. This moment has been so anticipated, and this president has taken impropriety to such new heights, that this vote to impeach feels anti-climactic. It is indeed historic, but it is a beginning not an end. The next stop in this process will be the U.S. Senate which is expected to hold a two-week trial next year to decide whether or not to remove Trump from office. While this decision is up to the Senators who will eventually have to cast a vote, this vote will be highly influenced by public opinion.
What does public opinion have to do with this? First of all, impeachment and possible removal from office is a loosely stipulated provision of the U.S. Constitution that provides Congress with a check on presidential power. However, this check is not so much legal as it is political. The difficulty is that while the process is set out, what constitutes an “impeachable” offense is less clear. The House of Representatives can draw up and vote on articles of impeachment and then the Senate runs a trial and must reach a 2/3 vote to remove the president from office. But what for? It can be “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors," which is highly open to interpretation.
All of this makes for a partisan and therefore tribal affair, which is why public opinion is so important. It is perfectly understandable that a political party is going to defend its own president, but only up until a certain point. Richard Nixon’s resignation is a good example. Republicans backed him until public opinion turned decidedly against him, with Representative Lawrence Hogan, Sr. being the first Republican to announce that he would vote to impeach Nixon. Of course, this impeachment vote never happened because Nixon saw the writing on the wall as more Republican representatives turned on him, so he resigned.
Wednesday’s vote largely took place along party lines, with no Republicans voting to impeach Trump and threeDemocrats defecting and voting against an impeachment. In fact, that Democrat, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, announced last week that he would not only vote against an impeachment, but he would also change parties. While this might seem unthinkable, it can happen because members of Congress depend on voters in their states or districts to be re-elected and much less on the good will and support of their party. Van Drew is from a conservative district and made the calculation that he has a better chance of winning again in November as a Republican.
This is why Republicans remain tied to Trump: most Republican voters still support him and would make any House member or Senator pay dearly for a betrayal. In early November, Gallup found that Trump’s average approval rating among Republicans has been 86% and has never dropped below 79%. But as we’ve learned here in Spain, public opinion can be volatile, and polls are not predictive. Much like Republicans stopped supporting Nixon when the public started supporting an impeachment, the same would happen if public opinion swiftly turned on Trump.
For now, there is little indication that Republican voters are turning against Trump. While his approval ratings are indeed historically low, mostly hovering between 39 and 40%, there has been no abrupt change these past few weeks. Likewise, public opinion for and against impeachment and/or removal from office seems to mostly divide along partisan lines, although there was an important shift in October, when slightly more people began to support an impeachment (around 48% at the time of writing) than oppose it (around 46%).
Unless this takes a dramatic turn, which would require new evidence or testimony, there is little hope that 20 Republican Senators will vote to remove Trump from office. Sure, Mitt Romney is Trump’s most famous Republican critic and there are a few more, but not enough. So far, plans for a brief, perhaps two-week-long Senate trial include no new evidence or testimony and Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it clear that he doesn’t intend to uphold the oath he and other Senators will take to “do impartial justice.” McConnell told reporters, “This is a political process. I’m not impartial about this at all.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi approached impeachment with such caution because she knew the public opinion game involved. The biggest cautionary tale is that Bill Clinton came out of his impeachment and subsequent Senate trial acquittal more popular than ever. But he didn’t have to face re-election. Andrew Johnson’s impeachment happened during an election year, but in the wake of a civil war the public was very nervous about what removing him from office would do to the country. Since they were only months away from an election, it made more sense to let the American people decide, but his reelection hopes ended when he was unable to secure the Democratic nomination.
Can an impeached president win re-election? Trump will very well be the second president to attempt to do so and given his proclivity to defy all odds, I’m not making any bets.
This op-ed was published in Spanish in El Español.