Impeachment Is Falling Apart as Moderate Democrats Get Cold Feet

On Sunday morning, Washington Post reporter Rachael Bade told a CNN panel that she’s hearing that moderate Democrats have been looking at the public shift in the polls on impeachment and are getting cold feet.

“I think what we’re starting to see, you know, is when the impeachment inquiry was first announced and they started to do these depositions, a lot of people were asking, ‘Can Nancy Pelosi peel off any Republicans’ in this final impeachment vote. But I increasingly think the question is becoming does [Nancy Pelosi] lose more Democrats? Because Republicans have really unified behind the president, and although two Democrats voted against the impeachment inquiry rules that they voted on a couple of weeks ago, we are hearing behind-the-scenes there are moderates getting cold feet. And it comes back to these ads and people being afraid for being punished for voting to impeach the president.”

Of course part of the reason for polls turning against impeachment is the fact that the hearings haven’t gone as well as Democrats had hoped. It’s become increasingly clear that the so-called witnesses are barely witnesses at all, but instead, anti-Trump voices relying on hearsay to paint a narrative of impeachable conduct. With moderate Democrats jumping off the impeachment ship—as many of us suspected would happen—Pelosi and Schiff are now facing a nightmare scenario where they have to move forward on an impeachment that could potentially fail, or just barely pass and have significant bipartisan opposition to it. If that happens, they will be severely wounded leading up to an election with a base dejected and defeated.