"There appears to be an emerging consensus that the impeachment of Donald Trump won’t matter very much in November, 2020."

John Cassidy writes in "Impeaching Donald Trump Is Already a Win for Democrats" (The New Yorker), and I note the weasel words "appears" and "emerging" and the lack of specificity about the set of persons who are coagulating into this consensus.

Is he looking entirely at those who are hoping to steel the Democrats to get through this next phase?

“Impeachment will eclipse all for the next seven weeks. And then it will recede, and other events will supersede it as the election year moves on,” David Axelrod, the CNN commentator and former adviser to Barack Obama, commented in a Twitter thread on Thursday. 

That's already clearly untrue. Impeaching isn't eclipsing all. Just yesterday, the impeachment was eclipsed by good economic news, an act of violence, and Trump talking about toilets. If you can't even get the next day right, your assurances about the next year sound like made-up happy talk.

In a Times Op-Ed, Michael Tomasky, the editor of Democracy, wrote, “I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that when we pore over the exit polls next Nov. 4, impeachment itself will have been a minor factor in people’s voting, let alone the question of how many articles the House passed.”

Dollars to doughnuts? Is that anything like malarkey? I'm going to guess that Michael Tomasky is over 70, because I'm almost 70 and I've only ever heard "dollars to doughnuts" from people who seemed really old to me. I looked. He's 59. I'm going to assume he's adopting a cornball, folksy style because he's knows it's a con.

Axelrod and Tomasky are shrewd and experienced observers....

No, they're not shrewd and experienced observers. They're shrewd and experienced participants in political discourse, manipulators of opinion. They're not prognosticating because they're trying to get it right. They're trying to affect what happens and what people think.

[Ezra Levin, the co-founder and co-executive director of the Indivisible movement] said that he wasn’t making any predictions about the outcome. But he added, “It was vital to demonstrate that elections do have consequences and that the Democrats will use their power to stand up to Trump.” If Pelosi and her colleagues had refused to launch an impeachment process, Levin went on, “it would have been enormously demoralizing for all these people who were newly engaged after 2016.”

This argument seems incontrovertible.

So a failure to impeach would be remembered. Cassidy praised Axelrod and Tomasky as "shrewd and experienced observers" because they recognize that "the news agenda moves rapidly these days" and that voters are interested in health care and the economy — things other than the impeachment. But somehow it's "incontrovertible" that the impeachment is crucial to the Indivisible movement, about which Cassidy says nothing other than that it "has more than five thousand affiliated local groups." Wikipedia makes it sound like one of these efforts to have a Tea Party of the left.

Cassidy says:

I suspect [this incontrovertible argument] is why Pelosi ultimately came around to supporting impeachment, despite the reservations of some House Democrats who represent purple districts. (That and the fact that Trump’s abuse of Presidential power in pressuring Ukraine to dig up dirt on his domestic political opponents was so egregious.) 

Ha ha. I love the parenthetical. I'm imagining Cassidy panicking after he wrote that Pelosi went forward with impeachment for the purely political reason of appeasing the left wing of her party. What a pathetical parenthetical!

Now the local activists who have spent three years opposing Trump can watch the House Judiciary Committee file articles of impeachment against him. When the process moves to the Senate, in January, they will be the ones demonstrating outside the offices of Republican, and, if necessary, Democratic senators and pressing them to convict the President....

Yeah, that will be a good look for the Democrats going into the elections. Trump haters demonstrating in the streets, clamoring for conviction, making your supposedly law-based trial look unfair and hot-headed.

And Trump supporters know how to show up in droves.

[N]one of this means that the impeachment process couldn’t end up alienating some independent voters who believe Trump’s misdeeds don’t rise to the level of impeachable offenses, or who think Congress should let voters determine his fate next November. That may happen. And an impeachment trial will certainly fire up pro-Trump activists as well.

That's the penultimate sentence and it's packed with concessions I would pillory Cassidy for failing to make. Here's the last paragraph, which begins with "But..." and has Cassidy adopting Ezra Levin's pitch as his own:

But these threats have to be balanced against the imperative of maintaining an energized front against Trump going into an election year. As a disruptive insurgent who eagerly fans social and racial resentments, he has always had an enthusiastic base—that isn’t going to change. One of the big challenges for Democrats—or anybody else opposed to Trump—is to nurture and sustain a nationwide countermovement that is at least equally passionate and engaged. From that perspective, as Levin pointed out, impeachment is already a win.

Premature celebration of a win... that's so reminiscent of 2016, when Hillary trounced Trump.