As House Democrats plod along to a battle victory in their full-year project to find some way to impeach Donald Trump, a few wonder why they’re losing the war. Despite total control of the Ukraine-Gate investigation process and lots of supportive media coverage, the polls haven’t moved in Democrats’ favor on impeachment since the whistleblower complaint got published. Weeks on end of public hearings and dire warnings of monarchies and dictatorships to come didn’t move them at all, except nudging voters against impeachment.

What are Democrats to do? Former senator Heidi Heitkamp suggests a really expensive ad campaign might just do the trick — and that’s just to convince Democratic voters:

Former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp says Democrats "are behind the eight ball" on impeachment messaging.

"They need to do a clear, concise message on why they're taking this vote, and there needs to be money behind that message." https://t.co/FSKRPsJV7d pic.twitter.com/hxMCXkl0UR

— ABC News (@ABC) December 18, 2019

HEITKAMP: If I have one criticism of how the Democrats have handled this, is they have ceded the territory, and Mike Bloomberg has stepped into what I think is a very serious void. The Democrats need to not just do town halls, they need to do a clear, concise message on why they’re taking this vote, and there needs to be money behind that message.

And the president politically is playing this right, and I think the Democrats are behind the eight-ball. They’re going to have to figure out how they’re going to send that message to their constituents that this is not an act of grievance, or you now, irrational, that what they’re doing is something that needed to be done, that there needed to be a constitutional statement made. And I think that message has not gotten through to their base constituency, to the constituents in those moderate districts.

Oof. If Heitkamp thinks this hasn’t been sold to the Democrats’ “base constituency,” they may be in bigger trouble than previously thought. And perhaps they are, as Jazz wrote in our previous post. The Hill reports on Trump campaign polling in these moderate districts that show impeachment becoming even more unpopular, 43/53, in 30 districts that went for Trump in 2016 but elected Democrats to the House in 2018.

It’s not just the in the swing districts where Democrats have failed to move the needle in the right direction. The 538 tracker today shows the narrowest gap (47.1/46.6)between support and opposition in more than two months as Nancy Pelosi prepares her caucus to jump off the cliff. At RealClearPolitics, opposition leads by nearly a full point (47.1/48.0) after trailing by several points for most of the same period.

The trend lines in both poll aggregators utterly undermine Heitkamp’s argument. Democrats had the floor to themselves, almost literally, for two full months. They highlighted the testimony they wanted, grandstanded about the testimony they didn’t take steps to procure, and then laid out their case in hearings that were covered live by the networks and by the cable-news channels along with C-SPAN. Those hearings led the news the entire time, with news reporters, television anchors, and pundits describing every development as a “bombshell.” House Democrats got far more earned media amplifying their message then they could have ever bought even with unlimited funds.

And yet, their argument didn’t sell beyond the Trump-hating base. In fact, the stock value dropped on impeachment. All that shows is that Democrats didn’t need a multi-million-dollar ad campaign. What they truly lacked was a compelling case — and that’s going to raise all sorts of questions when this impeachment flops in the US Senate.