View / The decline of the impeachment voter, and other midterm lessons so far

Last month, Colorado Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette sat next to her challengers and explained why she deserved a 16th term in Washington.

“Who is going to be the best choice to stand up to Donald Trump and the real threat he poses to our democracy?” DeGette asked at the Denver Press Club. “The answer is clear. I fought against Donald Trump as an impeachment manager in his first term.”

On Tuesday night, Denver voters rejected that pitch — as loudly as possible. Melat Kiros, a young attorney who lost her job after defending student Gaza protesters, defeated DeGette by double digits. Three Democratic incumbents have now lost to progressive challengers as midterms season kicks into high gear. The liberal group Justice Democrats, reeling after two left-wing “squad” members lost in 2024, is celebrating its best cycle ever, with more targets on the board next month.

Primary season is more than halfway over, after 31 states and the District of Columbia picked their nominees. There’s a three-week pause before intra-party contests start again with Arizona. That means it’s a good time to take stock of what’s happening.

Democrats don’t care if you resisted Trump and lost. DeGette went down one week after Rep. Dan Goldman, D-NY, whose role as an impeachment counsel during Trump’s first term was central to his campaign. A few weeks earlier, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who’d fought to disqualify Trump as a presidential candidate over his actions on Jan. 6, came fourth in a five-way race for governor. And shortly before that, Rep. Al Green, D-Texas — the first Democrat to introduce Trump impeachment resolutions during both of the president’s both terms — lost his newly gerrymandered seat to Rep. Christian Menefee, D-Texas.

Impeachment wasn’t the issue in those races. But it was striking how little Democratic primary voters cared about a political tool that had twice been wielded against Trump (before it shattered uselessly in the Senate). When I asked Goldman how he could say he “beat Trump,” given that Trump won his second reelection battle after two impeachments, he explained that in 2020 “Republican senators acknowledged we proved the case, we brought the American public along, and then Donald Trump, eight months later, lost the election.”

Primary voters disagreed. They look at Democrats who tried to remove Trump from office or keep him from coming back as losers. That’s a problem for Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan, who faces a primary next month against a Democratic Socialists of America-backed challenger, Donavan McKinney. “We’ve been through this circus already,” McKinney told me last year when I asked about Thanedar’s Trump impeachment resolutions.

Republicans do care if you defied Trump. This is obvious and oft-told, but we have an updated body count. Two senators (Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas) lost because Trump endorsed their opponents, after they tried to mollify him. Five Republican Indiana state senators lost because they won’t delete two Democratic House seats with a new map. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., bet that his crusades against government spending and the Iran war mattered more than his fight with Trump. They didn’t.

The fate of Rep. Dan Crenshaw in Texas is a little more complicated, because the revision of the congressional map ordered by Trump put him in a new district mostly represented by his opponent. That opponent, state Sen. Steve Toth, benefited from the impression that Crenshaw was more interested in his own brand than Trump’s. And Crenshaw was on record criticizing the effort to overturn the 2020 election, which most GOP primary voters supported.

Almost all of this unfolded without much downside for the GOP. Republicans still worry that Trump’s loyalty to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will put Cornyn’s seat at risk, but they have no concerns about Louisiana or Kentucky. Trump also made an exception for Republicans defending swing seats; there was no challenge to Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, or Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., who had faced primary challengers before. The party has found a kind of rhythm, where the president breaks fundraising records, spreads the wealth around, and, in return, gets to humiliate disloyal Republicans in seats that the party can’t lose.

Pro-Israel Democrats are on the back heel. This is the most significant reversal of fortune of the cycle. The Democratic fight-back against left-wing candidates began in 2021, when Democratic Majority for Israel funded ads against Nina Turner’s campaign for Congress in Ohio. They portrayed Turner as a Joe Biden critic, during the brief period when primary voters were grateful to the president for, they thought, exiling Trump from public life. Later that year, AIPAC launched its United Democracy Project super PAC, deploying the same message in other Democratic primaries.

The strategy paid off in the summer of 2024, when pro-Israel groups spent to beat Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., and Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo. Both had been weakened by scandals totally unrelated to their politics — Bush for paying her husband as part of a security detail, Bowman for pulling a House office fire alarm during a vote. And both got buried by ads that accused them of being bad Democrats for holding out their votes on Biden’s signature legislation. DMFI and the AIPAC network were playing the role for Democrats that the US Chamber of Commerce played for Republicans in 2014: Insurance against candidates who could win their seats but would cause problems for party leaders if they won.

The Chamber’s work to prevent right-wing nationalists from winning primaries feels like the last gasp of the country club GOP, before the MAGA movement took over. Pro-Israel groups may be repeating that history. Primary voters are far more angry at the party that lost to Trump again, and telling them that Dangerous Left-Wing Candidate X trashed Kamala Harris won’t work. (Darializa Avila Chevalier did apologize for insulting Harris, but voters didn’t hold it against her.) And support for Israel has collapsed. In the summer of 2024, Gallup found that 47% of Democrats viewed Israel favorably, to just 26% who viewed the Palestinians favorably. That has since flipped: Democrats now view the Palestinian territories more favorably than Israel by a 14-point margin.

That’s been devastating for the pro-Israel groups which, until this cycle, were able to rush into primaries and rescue more moderate candidates. AIPAC is now so despised by Democratic voters that groups and candidates who have taken money from its donors have to work not to get tagged as pro-AIPAC shills.

Money wins. The toxicity of pro-Israel groups in Democratic primaries has been mitigated by the rise of artificial intelligence and crypto industry PACs. In suburban Chicago, they were decisive in helping former Democratic Rep. Melissa Bean stage a comeback, rebranding her as a proud Barack Obama Democrat and aiding her victory over a left-wing candidate who couldn’t consolidate the vote. In Houston, they helped Menefee crush Green, who couldn’t convince primary voters that they needed to support him to stop a rapacious industry.

Every cycle, there are fewer limits on campaign spending, and more money being spent by corporate PACs to help their preferred candidates. Corporations have already busted their spending record set in 2024 — $461 million then, compared to $517 million as of June this year. This isn’t new, it’s just expanding every cycle, as Democrats mutter about a constitutional amendment to repeal Citizens United, which no one is actually trying to ratify.

Democrats aren’t bereft. The emergence of American Priorities, a pro-Gaza super PAC, has made a big impact for the left, putting early money into primaries and letting them define themselves before business and pro-Israel spending arrives. Eight of the Democrats backed by that PAC, including Kiros, have won their primaries. The left has built a funding infrastructure and a media infrastructure — DropSite News, Zeteo, Hasan Piker’s stream — that allows them to take advantage of good electoral trends in a way they couldn’t two, four, and even eight years ago.

That will be true in three weeks, when the primaries pick up again.