According to recent reports, White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney has no doubts as to the effect of the Democratic "impeachment" drive.

Mulvaney has stated repeatedly in recent White House meetings that he believes that the impeachment effort will result in President Trump carrying 45 states in next year's election.  He also believes that the longer it goes on, the worse it will get for the Democrats.

While this is far from a consensus opinion, it makes perfect sense, considering the public response to the impeachment push: indifference or hostility to the Democrat/media campaign coupled with a vast outpouring of financial and political support for the president.

It is becoming clear that impeachment cannot be utilized as a political weapon.  The three previous efforts were all less than completely successful.  Andrew Johnson squeezed through by a single vote.  Richard M. Nixon resigned before the trial, cheating the hangman, while in the case of Bill Clinton, it was beaten in the Senate. 

It may well prove that impeachment can't be utilized politically at all, that it is a "bottom-up" mechanism, one that must be demanded by the people before being put into play by politicians.  Since impeachment effectively negates the national vote, this is as it should be.  All the previous impeachments were "top down" efforts, political in nature, with large-scale public approval lacking.  (Partially excepting the Nixon case, although he still had millions of supporters at the time of his resignation.)

So even as the current effort devolves into a weird, meaningless pantomime on the part of Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, we may well have learned something worth knowing about the nature of American government.