Read: The Clinton impeachment, as told by the people who lived it

Tad Devine, a senior strategist for Al Gore, the Democratic nominee in 2000, concurs. Bush’s ability to tap the public’s dismay over Clinton’s personal life “more than anything else got in our way in terms of winning the election,” he told me. Even if the Senate doesn’t convict Trump, Devine believes, impeachment in the House could offer Democrats a similar chance to highlight the aspects of Trump’s volatile behavior that most alienate swing voters.

“If impeachment is done properly, then the Democratic nominee will be talking about it [next year] and not be running away from it in the general election,” he said. “I don’t look at it as something that is going to derail a Democratic nominee. Just like we saw in 2000, an impeachment inquiry could very badly damage somebody who is associated with it.”

The notion that impeaching Clinton hurt the Republican Party isn’t entirely a myth. The House Republican majority voted to formally begin an impeachment inquiry in October 1998, just weeks before the midterm elections. GOP leaders confidently predicted that public revulsion with Clinton would lead to big Republican gains. “The Republicans were all full of themselves going into the election,” says then–Democratic Representative Martin Frost of Texas, who chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that year. “They expected to pick up 20 or 30 seats.” Instead, in November, Democrats gained five—the first time a president’s party had won House seats in the sixth year of his tenure since Andrew Jackson in 1834.

But it’s easy to overstate the magnitude of the GOP’s backslide in 1998. In the Senate, Democrats gained no seats that year, leaving the Republican majority intact. Nor did the five-seat House loss cost the GOP its majority in that chamber. Republicans still won more of the total national popular vote in House races than Democrats. Swing voters didn’t stampede away from the GOP; in exit polls, Republicans still narrowly beat Democrats among independent voters. And while impeachment provoked big turnout from African Americans, Clinton’s most passionate supporters, overall, turnout that year was very low.

The midterm election was widely seen as a red light from the public on impeachment. But Republicans barreled ahead and voted in mid-December to remove Clinton anyway. On the day they did so, there was about as much public support for impeaching Clinton as there is today for impeaching Trump. A Gallup poll at the time showed that 35 percent of the public overall backed impeachment, including 40 percent of independents. In a CNN poll this week, 41 percent of the public supported impeachment, including 35 percent of independents. Overall, Clinton’s public support in Gallup polling was much stronger at the time (63 percent job-approval rating) than Trump’s is now (40 percent).