Some Democrats, including Rep. Maxine Waters, have been openly talking about impeachment for more than a year now. Because of that threat, the White House is said to be focused on the fight to hold the House this fall and thereby avoid a drawn-out impeachment battle which could overwhelm the remainder of Trump’s four-year term. From the Hill:

Trump told a rally of supporters in Michigan over the weekend that the looming threat of impeachment is a driving reason to protect the House.

“We have to keep the House because if we listen to Maxine Waters, she’s going around saying ‘We will impeach him,’ ” Trump said Saturday…

Another party strategist said the order from the president to the Republican National Committee (RNC) has been clear: Protect the House at all costs.

“It’s clear the message has been, ‘We don’t want to want to have to fool with impeachment proceedings with the final two years of his first term, you better do something,’” the strategist said, requesting anonymity to discuss party deliberations.

But the sudden interest in talking about impeachment isn’t a result of panic, according to a follow-up story at the Hill, but of strategy. Some of Trump’s former advisers, including Corey Lewandowski, David Bossie, and Steve Bannon, believe the secret to holding the house lies in turning up the volume on impeachment talk.

Democratic enthusiasm in the elections is likely to be sky-high, given the broad liberal antipathy to the president. The best way to counteract that, the cadre of loyalists believe, is to make the stakes high enough to draw hordes of conservative voters to the polls.

If those voters believe Democrats want to throw Trump out of office — the most dramatic negation of the 2016 result imaginable — they might rally to his side.

This seems like is a counter-intuitive way to go about rescuing control of the House, but the piece goes on to point out that at least one Democratic strategist agrees with the underlying theory, i.e. there’s a risk to Democrats if the right gets worked up prior to the election.

Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf told The Hill that they were right.

“The thing that Democrats have going for them right now is that the Republican electorate is not excited. But the best way to excite them is to go after them. Impeachment they will see as really going after them,” Sheinkopf said.

“The whole trick for Democrats is to avoid exciting Republicans,” he added. “Excite them at your own risk!”

Another hint that Trump’s former advisers might be on to something came from Harry Reid who said in an interview last week “The less we talk about impeachment, the better off we are as a country.” Reid’s framing this in statesmanlike terms. I’ll leave it to you to decide if his record of saying whatever it takes to win suggests the good of the country is his main concern (hint: it’s not).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIbV5IMnU2Q

There’s an obvious danger of going all in on a strategy like this though. If you raise the specter of impeachment and still lose the House, then Democrats can claim they’ve been given a mandate to follow through. If the White House runs against impeachment, the White House had better win.