“Oh, God,” billionaire Democratic donor Tom Steyer laments to Politico’s Maggie Severn, “inside the Beltway everybody thinks I’m a low-double-digit IQ.” Perhaps that’s because Steyer insists that impeaching Donald Trump will be his litmus test for determining whether to support the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee.

Er … who wants to tell him?

Steyer says he’ll see how his political organizing evolves in 2019 before deciding what his process may be for supporting a 2020 candidate, but he is increasingly using impeachment as a litmus test in looking at politicians. “Unless you support impeachment, we’re not supporting you,” Steyer said on Sunday.

All right, stay with me on this, because it’s gonna get complicated. What does Steyer think will happen in 2020 in the presidential election? Either Donald Trump wins, loses, or chooses not to run at all. Or put another way, either the 2020 Democratic nominee will beat Trump, lose to Trump, or run against a different Republican. In two of three scenarios, Trump won’t be in office after January 2021.

Again, let’s take this slow. If the Democratic nominee wins in November 2020, then Trump will be out of office two months later. With me so far? Good. Now, if that’s the case, then … what does it matter whether the nominee supported impeachment? Who would get impeached at that point? Trump’s out anyway. Impeachment would be a waste of time. And a president-elect would have no role in an impeachment even if a lame-duck House decided to take it up against a lame-duck president anyway.

But what about if Trump wins? Well, then the losing Democratic nominee would then have the authority to do, er … nothing at all. Even if Steyer still wanted to push for impeachment immediately after voters re-elected Trump, the Democratic candidate would be outside of that loop entirely. And a lame-duck House would hardly have the nerve to impeach a president that just won a second endorsement from the states and their voters. That’s why even making this a litmus test for the 2020 congressional and Senate elections makes little sense either.

With all that futility in mind, why would a Democratic presidential candidate waste his or her time on impeachment? That’s an issue for the House of Representatives to decide. Presidential candidates need to establish why they should be president, not why the current one needs to be kicked out of office and replaced by Mike Pence. Having an opinion might be fine, but any rational candidate would have that issue a long way down their priority list.

Small wonder that people in the Beltway have a low opinion of Steyer’s intelligence. They’re not too impressed with the results of his 24/7 impeachment drive, either:

“I don’t know how many millions Tom Steyer has spent on television at this point on the subject of impeachment, but it’s a lot of millions, right? And I don’t sense any moving of the needle because of it,” said Jerry Crawford, an Iowa lawyer and party operative. “It just sounds like more partisan bickering to the public, which essentially has zero tolerance level for that.”

The data from the WaPo/ABC poll shows that Crawford nails it here. It’s moot anyway, because by the time Democrats pick a nominee, they won’t need to argue for impeachment and removal. They can accomplish that end more legitimately through the ballot box. Democratic candidates for the nomination are focused on that process, as they should be, rather than on Steyer’s obsession.