Amid Trump’s falling poll numbers, Republicans are hoping to weaponize Democratic threats of impeachment to bolster their performance in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections.
Speaking with NBC News, one senior Republican strategist suggested that dangling the threat of impeachment over the heads of Republican voters “will be the subtext of everything we do, whether it’s said overtly or not,” speaking with the outlet on the condition of anonymity.
As of Monday, Trump’s approval rating has reached a second-term low at 37%, just barely eking out his all-time low of 34% seen during the end of his first term. Independent voters are leading the drop in Trump’s favorability ratings, which fell 10 percentage points since the president took office in January.
To head off a potential walloping in the midterms, Republicans are hedging their bets that the looming threat of a Democratic majority impeaching Trump for a third time could be enough to motivate GOP voters to head to the polls en masse.
“The Trump voters are happy and complacent right now, and we have to get them fired up for next year,” said John McLaughlin, a Trump pollster, speaking to NBC News.
“We have a lot of work to do. If President Trump is not on the ballot, it’s harder to get them out. We know what the stakes are in the midterm elections. If we don’t succeed, Democrats will begin persecuting President Trump again. They would go for impeachment.”
Democrats, however, aren’t taking the bait, with many top Democrats seeing the ploy for what it is: an effort to maintain a Republican majority in Congress.
“You’ve got to be careful, you’re liable to make him a martyr,” said former Rep. Bob Brady of Pennsylvania, who chairs the Philadelphia Democratic Party, speaking with NBC News.
Democrats who spoke with NBC News said that impeachment was hardly top of mind for party members going forward, and that their focus during the midterms will be about ‘kitchen table issues,’ things like lowering costs and increasing economic opportunity. Some even noted the futility of pursuing a third impeachment given the fact that the previous two largely left Trump unscathed, and by some accounts, even more popular among his base.
“We’ve already impeached him twice,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), speaking with NBC News. “So obviously that’s not a complete solution, given that he is able to beat the two-thirds constitutional spread. So I don’t think anybody thinks that’s going to be the utopian solution to our problems.”