By now, virtually everyone in the nation knows that on her first day in office, Detroit Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib told a large Move On rally that she’d said to her young son, “we’re going to go in there and impeach the … MF.” Except, of course, she said the whole 12-letter word.
That caused a storm of pious outrage, some real and some not, and she later apologized for her language. She hasn’t given up demanding the President’s impeachment, however; she had a column in the magazine In These Times Wednesday, demanding “Impeach Trump Now.”
Well, Democrats probably do have a sufficient majority in the House to impeach Donald Trump if Speaker Nancy Pelosi so chose, but it would be impossible to get the U.S. Senate to convict and remove him.
They would need at least twenty Republican senators to agree, and that would only happen if the Mueller investigation reveals that Trump is really Joseph Stalin in disguise.
But Tlaib’s real political problem is not impeaching Trump. It is managing to win reelection to her seat in the House next year, and right now the odds are against her.
And here’s why. She was elected last year from the second poorest district in America; Michigan’s 13th district is mostly in Detroit, and is majority black. Tlaib, who is a Muslim of Palestinian Arabic origins, won the Democratic primary with a mere 31 percent of the vote.
She finished just 900 votes or one percent ahead of Brenda Jones, the Detroit City Council President. Tlaib owes her victory to two black men who were also on the ballot – State Senators Coleman Young II and Ian Conyers. Both finished far out of the money, but polled more than enough votes that otherwise would have gone to Brenda Jones.
Want proof? There was also a special election that day for the last couple months of John Conyers’ term. For whatever reason, Coleman Young wasn’t on the ballot in that race, and Jones won by about 1,600 votes. Had there been a runoff between Tlaib and Jones for the full term, the numbers indicate Jones would probably have gotten 53 to 54 percent of the vote.
What this means is that if there is only one strong black candidate against Tlaib in the August 2020 primary, she will probably be history. Any single black candidate may not even have to be that strong. State Sen. David Knezek, a white man who also represented a mainly black district, was seen as one of the Democrats’ brightest future stars.
When he ran for renomination last year, he was opposed by one Betty Jean Alexander, a black single mother who had no history of being involved in politics at all, had no website and didn’t campaign. To everyone’s shock, she got 54 percent of the vote.
Four years earlier, Knezek had managed to be nominated because, as in Tlaib’s case, a number of black politicians were also on the ballot.
Tlaib’s constituents mostly have no use for Trump, and wouldn’t mind seeing him gone. But that’s not their top priority; they want jobs, better schools, less blight and protection from eviction and having their water shut off. If she can show them she’s fighting hard for those things, she may win their hearts and minds and another term.
David Knezek can tell her what may happen if she doesn’t.
