Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

Nancy Pelosi just took the biggest gamble of her entire political career. If she is ultimately successful, she will be remembered as the woman that removed Donald Trump from the White House, and Democrats will treat her like a hero for the rest of her life. But if she fails and Trump wins in 2020, the backlash that she created when she tried to impeach Trump is likely to be blamed, and she could potentially lose her leadership role in the House. Of course at that point she probably wouldn’t want to remain in the House much longer, and she would be hated by many Democrats for the rest of her life for subjecting them to four more years of Trump. So it really is all on the line for Nancy Pelosi, and she never should have gone down this road if she wasn’t absolutely certain that she could deliver.

And at this point, most Americans don’t want impeachment proceedings to happen. For example, just check out what a Politico/Morning Consult poll just found…

In the poll — conducted Friday through Sunday, as stories circled about Trump allegedly pressuring Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, one of the Democratic candidates hoping to oust him — 36 percent of respondents said they believe Congress should begin impeachment proceedings against Trump.

Other surveys have come up with similar results, but there is one survey out there that indicates that most Americans would actually support impeachment proceedings if the evidence shows that “Trump did use his presidential power to force a foreign leader to help take down a political rival”…

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday the opening of a formal impeachment inquiry against Trump in response to the Ukraine controversy. If it’s found that Trump did use his presidential power to force a foreign leader to help take down a political rival, 55 percent of U.S. adults said they would support removing him from office, according to a recent YouGov survey. Forty-four percent of those polled said they’d “strongly support” removing Trump if the allegations are true, while another 11 percent said they’d “somewhat support” it.

But as it stands right now, on the national level this is a very unpopular decision by Pelosi, and it could potentially hurt Democrats among key blocs of voters…

Worse yet, impeachment isn’t selling where Democrats made their best gains in the midterms. A majority of suburban respondents oppose starting the impeachment process (35 percent/50 percent), with a wider gap among rural respondents (27/59), while urban voters are more ambivalent than one might guess (47/35). Impeachment trails by double digits in the South (33/53), Midwest, (36/48), and even in the Democrat-friendly Northeast (37/48).

Another reason why this is potentially a giant mistake by Nancy Pelosi is the fact that all of this focus on Ukraine is almost certainly going to damage one of the frontrunners for the Democratic nomination.

All of a sudden, everyone is talking about Joe Biden, Hunter Biden and Ukraine. A lot of voters are going to look into what happened, and they are not going to be pleased. And this comes at a time when Elizabeth Warren is surging in the polls, and real votes will start to be cast in just a few months.

Up until recently, the Biden campaign had successfully kept the focus off Hunter Biden and Ukraine, and Joe was widely considered to be the heavy favorite to win the nomination.

But now everything could change thanks to Nancy Pelosi.

And what if this push toward impeachment is not successful? Trump’s base is going to be extremely fired up by all of the political drama over the next several months, and if Trump survives it is going to be a huge boost for his campaign.

All of the recent polls indicated that a Democrat was likely to win in 2020, and there was a very good chance that the Democrats were going to take the Senate too, but now this could dramatically shift public opinion and change everything.

Nancy Pelosi is rolling the dice, and if she fails it is going to be absolutely disastrous for the Democratic Party. The following is how Matthew Walther summarized the situation that she is facing…

Pelosi knows this will not be popular. She knows more than that. She knows that it will be a disaster for the Democratic Party, that it will inflame the president’s base and inspire even his most lukewarm supporters with a sense of outrage. She knows that in states like Michigan, upon which her party’s chances in 2020 will depend, the question of impeachment does not poll well. She knows, further, that Joe Biden will not be able to spend the next 14 or so months refusing to answer questions about the activities of his son, Hunter, in Ukraine, and that increased scrutiny of the vice president’s record in office will not rebound to his credit. She and her fellow Democratic leaders had better hope that someone like Elizabeth Warren manages to steal the nomination away from him before this defines his candidacy the way that Hillary Clinton’s emails and paid speechmaking did during and after the 2016 primaries.

And it isn’t going to be easy for Pelosi to be successful, because she is going to need 67 votes in the Senate to convict Trump, and right now Democrats only hold 47 seats.

In the end, this is yet another example that proves that America’s political system is deeply broken, and we desperately need a seismic change.

Because no matter what the end result is, this entire episode is going to be a giant stain in the history books.

If future generations of Americans get the chance, they will look back on this entire saga with disgust.

And if our founders could see us today, they would be rolling over in their graves, because this is not what they intended.