From the fog of complacency that enshrouds Democratic congressional leaders, one refrain billows above even the antiregulatory mantra of abundance—the siren song of popularism (not to be confused with “populism”). That would be the doctrine strictly confining the party’s lead policy initiatives to things that are poll-tested within an inch of their life, on the rough calculus that the next election cycle—always the most important one of our lifetimes—mandates that Democratic candidates never frighten the horses with unfamiliar, bold, or original proposals to improve actual living conditions in our flailing republic. No, the directive is not only to think inside the box, but also to bury the entirety of the party’s social-democratic and New Deal legacy in it—and to pray that the electorate will rally against all odds to worship the dogmas of the moribund Third Way.

For citizens stubbornly adhering to the notion that politics should involve new ideas, moral leadership, and—gasp!—the prospect of actual social change, popularism is chloroform in slogan form. It yields manifest absurdities like the Democrats’ chronic incoherence on immigration, their failure to capitalize on basic political opportunities such as the consolidation of a MAGA-aligned tech oligarchy, the actually unpopular right-wing war on public education, and their flight from virtually any social-democratic policy that can’t be means-tested. It’s what fuels the content-free mantra from elected Democrats that any given issue that might stir them out of somnolence is a “distraction from kitchen-table issues”—a refrain that typically fails to specify just what those issues are, or how they might be productively resolved. It’s also a ludicrously off-base response to an electoral system that runs on negative partisanship, and pointedly ignores the public’s policy preferences as a matter of course. (Small wonder, then, that the would-be wizards of Capitol Hill popularism are actually the least-popular figures in American politics.)

Last week saw perhaps the most direct indictment of the timorous non-reasoning behind the popularist posture, with the release of a poll from Strength in Numbers/Verasight showing that a solid majority of 53 percent agree that Congress has grounds to impeach President Donald Trump. Just 39 percent of respondents said there were no such grounds (with 11 percent hedging that reply as “probably not”). Only 8 percent said they are unsure. (There is, as yet, no confirmation that that 8 percent included all the leaders of the Democratic congressional caucus.) These findings align with an earlier Strength in Numbers/Verasight survey, which found an even higher ratio of respondents—55 percent—affirming that Congress should plunge ahead with a third Trump impeachment.

These findings are especially striking since there’s no serious impeachment measure before Congress now—this spring, Democratic Representative John Larson of Connecticut has floated 13 resolutions in the most recent symbolic bid to draw attention to the president’s manifold unfitness for the office he holds, and, like fellow House impeachment champion Shri Thanedar of Michigan, he’s doing so largely to fend off a primary challenge from the left. In other words, without any concrete push from Congress behind it, public support for Trump’s impeachment is already nearing the peak level of 56 percent reached during his second impeachment in 2021, in the wake of the failed coup of January 6. Indeed, as Strength in Numbers analyst G. Elliott Morris wrote in April, the majority behind Trump’s impeachment is comparable to the percentage of voters backing Richard Nixon’s impeachment just prior to his forced resignation, when Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee signaled they couldn’t be counted on any longer to forestall Nixon’s eventual conviction and removal from office.

In short, Trump’s impeachment is an initiative with popularist political opportunity written all over it—especially since, as Morris also noted, the intensity of pro-impeachment sentiment is quite robust: “Overall, 45% of all adults say they strongly support impeachment, while only 30% say they strongly oppose it. That is a 15-point intensity gap in favor of impeachment—the people who want Trump out are both more numerous and more committed than the people who want him to stay.” (Emphasis in original.) The newer poll on the grounds for impeachment reveals a parallel enthusiasm gap, with 40 percent of respondents in the “yes, definitely camp” compared to 28 percent replying “definitely not”—a 12-point split.

It’s long been a shibboleth in Washington that impeachment is a political act, as opposed to a straightforward legal proceeding, and in political terms, these kinds of numbers—together with Trump’s dismal approval rating—are a flashing green light to initiate wide-ranging, serious impeachment proceedings on fronts ranging from Trump’s grotesque violations of war powers to his all-but-hourly trespasses against the Emoluments Clause. Despite the procedural obstacles before it in a GOP-led Congress, impeachment remains the most direct way for Democrats to show that they’re doing more than paying lip service to the central goal of preserving the remnants of US democracy from MAGA predation—a theme they played up in the 2024 election cycle to decidedly equivocal effect. And given the Supreme Court’s baseless embrace of executive immunity, impeachment is also Congress’s strongest last-ditch hope to reclaim a measure of its autonomy in an era of runaway executive-branch impunity.

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Yet it’s precisely because impeachment is a political act that Democratic leaders abhor it. Along with everything else, popularism is an alibi to never engage in politics, which in most commonsense understandings of the practice, represents an effort to fundamentally alter the terms of debate rather than to genuflect mindlessly before their status quo incarnation. But this version of politics also represents a first-order threat to a Democratic leadership caste steeped in the bogus meritocratic pieties of credentialism and seniority.

Politics involves argument, persuasion, and strategic division on controversies and major policy issues. Leading Democrats, on the other hand, envision themselves as managers implementing an agenda of social peace and quiescence amid conditions of rampaging inequality, class resentments, and authoritarian squalor. So. even as more members of the House Democratic caucus agitate for either impeachment or the far more unlikely and symbolic invocation of the Constitution’s 25th Amendment, minority leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York has proclaimed yet again that impeachment will not be a priority after the likely Democratic recapture of the House in this year’s midterms. Like all prominent Democratic leaders, Jeffries recites the numbing, platitudinous mantra that the party is focused on kitchen-table issues—as though it’s not possible to focus on basic accountability to the Constitution while fretting about the cost of living, or to grasp that the seizure of untrammeled power by the authoritarian Trump regime is the prime mover of the Iran War, which is causing energy costs to spiral across the globe. Jeffries is so practiced at repeating this content-challenged talking point that he now just sounds like an animatronic display of a 1992 Bill Clinton at Madame Tussaud’s: “We believe in this country, you work hard, you play by the rules. You should be able to live an affordable life, a comfortable life, in fact, to live the good life, and that means a good paying job and good housing, good health care, good education for your children, and when it’s all said and done, a good retirement.” I guess that’s just as well, because on the rare occasions where he’s pressed to simulate the vertebrate state of an actual legislative leader, he’s reduced to unintelligible word-salad formulations like “In terms of…impeachment and things of that matter, we’ve said we’ve ruled nothing out and we’ve ruled nothing in.”

What he means is: “We’ve ruled it out.” It’s an article of faith among leaders like Jeffries and his Senate counterpart Chuck Schumer, also of New York (Excelsior!), that impeachment, already doomed to go nowhere in the GOP-led House and Senate, will mostly serve to motivate Trump’s MAGA base in the upcoming midterm cycle, as it purportedly did after his prior two impeachments. As Morris also notes, this, too, is a basic misreading of the fundamental dynamics of this midterms cycle. (Never mind as well that Trump lost the 2020 election after the first impeachment effort drew wide attention to his corrupt bid to strong-arm Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings—or that his, again popular, second impeachment involved his efforts to seize autocratic power by rescinding the results of that selfsame election.)

In reality, the relevant midterm math would likely tilt in the Democrats’ favor, should they summon the basic political and moral courage to move ahead on impeachment. As Morris wrote in April, 24 percent of respondents who voted for Trump in 2024 now support his impeachment. For a Democratic Party that’s been convulsed in self-inflicted agonies over how it can plausibly appeal to voters aligned with the right—to the point of ardently embracing former Republican political nonentities like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger in the dumbest iteration of bipartisan messaging imaginable—here’s a tailor-made solution.

Impeachment would also serve as a powerful weapon against GOP congressional incumbents saddled with the thankless task of running for reelection as Trump’s approval numbers crater and as many of his prominent former MAGA allies are disowning his presidency. Any House member can introduce an impeachment resolution at any time—which means Democratic lawmakers can essentially dial up referendums on Trump’s unpopular presidency at will. (It’s not as if Congress is doing anything of substance anyway.) The attack ads write themselves: After Donald Trump threatened a genocide in Iran and bombed civilian targets without congressional authorization, my opponent voted to let him stay in office to keep waging his illegal, costly, and immoral war four separate times! You can include clips from Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson to nail the point down.

But what am I saying? This is Politics 101, and therefore kryptonite to Democratic leaders. They continue to extol their own tactical savvy on cable TV hits as Trump tries to bully the Republican conference into endorsing a resolution to expunge his two prior impeachments. Should that exercise in Stalinist historical revision gain any traction, leaders of the Democrat caucus will be sure to offer a bold new refrain: Expungement is another effort to distract us all from kitchen-table issues.