WI: The Republicans gained in Congress in the 1998 midterms

Clinton would've had to have done something much worse in order for the public to support impeachment. If that were the case however, Gingrich might hold on another two years, but I think his skeletons would catch up with him eventually.
 
If the Republican party had picked up even a small number of seats, there would have been no basis to remove Gingrich in 1998, regardless of his personal popularity. However, the Republican party also lost two seats in 2000, which might have provided the impetus for Republicans dissatisfied with Gingrich's leadership style to force him out.
 
If the Republican party had picked up even a small number of seats, there would have been no basis to remove Gingrich in 1998, regardless of his personal popularity. However, the Republican party also lost two seats in 2000, which might have provided the impetus for Republicans dissatisfied with Gingrich's leadership style to force him out.
The 2000 election might have a different GOP nominee and different downballot effects if Gingrich is still Speaker.
 
He might be in a better position but I think the congressional party was aiming for new leadership anyways, less so on ideological grounds and moreso on the changes he made to the committee and fundraising mechanisms (essentially, he concentrated a lot of power in the Speaker's office, and this rubbed a lot of people the wrong way). Hastert didn't have to be the new Speaker, but Gingrich was probably on his way out anyways.

In retrospect, a lot of what Gingrich did in 1995 has sort of defined congressional politics since, for both good (putting a lot more pressure on members to spend time in their districts, as well as getting the ball rolling on earmark reform, for example) and ill (reducing crossparty communication and work, and disintermediating the party from fundraising, which allows for more outside influence)

A good way for this scenario to come about is for the economy to get hit in some substantial way from the Asian meltdown of 1997; we were mostly insulated from that and the economy was booming in 1998.
 
The party leadership was definitely aiming to get rid of him, but I think with a gain of seats they'd have harder time getting backbenchers to support his removal.
 
There would have been no effect on the impeachment proceedings whatsoever.

I did a check on Wikipedia to see what individual races would be affected by more votes for GOP candidates, since these will often produce butterflies. These were the closest Democratic victories in the Senate races:

Nevada Reid over Ensign by 0.1%

Wisconsin Feingold over Neuman by 2.2%

S. Carolina Hollings over Inglis by 7%

California Boxer over Fong by 10%

New York Schumer over DÁmato by 10.5%

I think NY and California would have still gone the same way, since a historical 10% margin is still too much for even a wave to overcome and both states were trending hard blue. The South Carolina result wound up not really mattering, since Hollings retired in 2004 and was replaced by a Republican who was very similar to Inglis. But Reid and to a lesser extent Feingold had enough of an influence on federal politics in the 00s that removing them in 1998 would have had an effect. The effect would have been from removing Reid and Feingold, looking at their bios Ensign did become a Senator later and Neuman doesn't seem likely to have done anything notable and there is a good chance he loses in 2004 when Wisconsin went blue at the presidential level IOTL. What two additional GOP victories does do is remove Democratic control of the Senate in 2001-3, and possibly in 2007-9 depending on the butterflies.

Here are the closest Democratic victories in the House:

Connecticut 5 (NE CT) Maloney over Neilson 0.9%

Colorado 2 (Boulder area) Udall over Greenlee 2.5%

Indiana 9 (SE IN) Hill over Leising 2.9%

Illinois i7 (rural western IL) Evans over Baker 3%

Oregon 1 (NE OR) Wu over Bordanaro 3%

New Jersey 12 (relatively rural NE corner of NJ) Holt over Pappas 3%

Nevada 1 (Las Vegas) Berkely over Cairez 3.5%

Minnesota 6 (Minneapolis suburbs) Luther over Klin 4%

Kansas 3 (east central KS) Moore over Snowbarger 4.8%

Wisconsin 2 (Madison area) Baldwin over Musser 5.1%

Pennsylvania 13 (Philly main line suburbs) Hoeffel over Fox 5%

Washington 1 (suburbs north of Seattle) Inslee over White 5.7%

New York 4 (Hempstead township) McCarthy over Baker 6%

Kentucky 4 (N KY) Lucas over Willams 6.8%

Michigan 10 (Macomb county) Bonoir over Palmer 7.1%

Mississippi 4 (Gulfport, Biloxi) Shows over Houseman 8%

Texas 17 (sparsely populated area south of Red River) Stenholm over Izzard 8%

Washington 3 (lower Columbia) Baird over Benton 8.4%

New Mexico 3 (N NM) Udall over Redmond 10%

The Republicans won the national popular vote for the House elections by something line 2.5%, so their loss of a handful of seats was likely due to bad bounces in a few races due to local factors.

Its impossible to determine a national pattern in these 18 races, in fact they seem to have been determined by local factors and House races were much less nationalized at the time than they are now. The Republicans would not have taken all of them in a wave, maybe 8-10 seats. At least three of the newly elected Democratic Congressmen later became Senators (both Udalls and Baldwin) but otherwise I don't seen any butterflies in terms of which candidates got elected.
 
To amend my earlier post, I just realized that after losing narrowly in 1998, Ensign ran again for Senate from Nevada in 2000 and won. If it had been Reid that had lost narrowly in 1998, he too could have just run again and won in 2000. The only effect would have been that the two politicians had swapped seats from OTL. While GW Bush carried Nevada in 2000, that would be offset by Reid's credibility after 16 years in the House and the Senate and Reid proved in 2010 that he could win in a Republican wave year. So Reid losing in 1998 probably would not have changed much.

Sort of the same with Feingold. IOTL, he lost in the Republican wave of 2010, ran again for his old seat in 2016 and lost again. But 2016 was sort of peak GOP in Wisconsin and Trump carried the state that year. If Feingold had lost in 1998 but ran again for his old seat in 2004, he likely would have succeeded since Kerry was carrying the state. Or he could have run for the other seat when Herb Kohl retired, especially if Tammy Baldwin doesn't get into Congress (as noted above she may well lose in 1998 if its a Republican wave year) and isn't an alternative candidate.

So this POD likely doesn't change anything significant at all.
 
If voters decided to reward the GOP for planning to impeach Clinton, would Gingrich have stayed Speaker?

By late 1998 the public was against both impeachment or resignation. In order for the American people to turn on Clinton, you'd need to have a different political climate in the lead up to the whole affair. Namely, the GOP doesn't destroy its credibility by hunting for an excuse to "get" Clinton at every turn. Further, Democrats would need to feel more independent from Clinton in order to break from the President. Even then, they would've supported resignation over impeachment. Daschle and Gephardt had in fact planned on visiting the White House in September 1998 and telling Clinton to leave, if the Starr Report proved damning. But they weren't convinced that Clinton should leave so the meeting never took place.

Perhaps a working POD could occur in 1993: after taking office, Clinton decides to focus on the economy and taxes over social issues. The Democrats narrowly keep both Houses of Congress in 1994, and make small gains in 1996. The Republicans never overreach under Starr and Gingrich, while the Democratic majority has more freedom to be politically independent of Clinton as it was from 1993-1995. After Clinton's presidency spirals out of control from 1997-98, Congressional Democrats turn on the President and force him to resign in order to avoid greater midterm losses. Gore takes office and enjoys comfortably high approval ratings, helping to blunt the Democrats' midterm losses. But in the end, Republicans still gain control of both Houses and Gore is a lame duck.

That's the best I can do. If anyone else has suggestions or sees areas of improvement, go for it.
 
You don't necessarily need the public as a whole to reject Clinton/endorse impeachment. You just need to swing enough votes so that the Republicans gain one or two seats instead of losing four. Slightly weaker Democratic candidate recruitment or the extramarital affairs of prominent Republicans not coming out would do the trick.
 
The 2000 election might have a different GOP nominee and different downballot effects if Gingrich is still Speaker.
Perhaps, as Bush was largely a response to 1998. He did extremely well in his re-election that year against the national swing and seemed to get that Gingrich's style, while it had its fans, was ineffective at winning more broadly, and he talked a lot about this in the debates in late '99.

Still, that doesn't exactly mean that any of the others in 2000 were going to be better fits. Keyes was a fringe lightweight, Buchanan's message was unique but going nowhere in the middle of the DotCom Boom, and Forbes's appeal was too narrow to the professional class. McCain was really the only one who got any traction, and if Gingrich was still in charge, I'm not sure how they'd match up in terms of impact on party activists.

Bush's advantage came from the fact that he could tie the donor network of his father and the business wing of the party with the activist ground troops that he could appeal to with his Born Again experience.
 
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