June 19, 2006
Is Impeachment Bad for Dems?
By Kagro X
Back in March, I took a look at what little data there was that could test the conventional wisdom that discussion of impeachment was “bad” for Democrats. The data in question was the 2004 election results from Nevada, whose Democratic Party had included in its statewide platform a plank calling for impeachment.
The results, you may recall, were a net gain in seats in the state legislature, and increased Democratic performance in every Congressional District in the state.
Not rock solid proof that impeachment helps Dems at the polls, of course. But a solid data point in refuting the stab-in-the-dark guess — and that’s all it is — that impeachment hurts them.
Bottom line: the “I-word” was in the platform, the people voted, and Dems suffered not at all. And while you could argue that almost nobody pays attention to the platform, and thus the voters were largely unaware of that plank’s existence, that doesn’t save the argument. The claim was that any discussion of impeachment hurts Dems. Here, the best that can be said is that such a discussion didn’t even raise an eyebrow.
Filed under: Blog, In the News, 2006 Election News, Impeachment Strategy
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