Republicans have two tasks ahead of them in next year’s midterm elections: to hold on to the working-class voters former President Donald Trump attracted to the party while also trying to win back some of the college-educated suburbanites he repelled.
Doing both simultaneously may be easier said than done. The suburbs have sunk Republicans in consecutive national elections dating back to 2018. But the very qualities that made Trump’s party toxic with those voters also enabled it to be competitive in the Rust Belt, which remained close even with President Biden sitting atop the Democratic ticket in place of Hillary Clinton.
Even in defeat, Republicans eyed the basic contours of a multiracial working-class coalition that could help them win in the future and Democrats saw worrying signs that the “Rainbow Coalition” they had been pining for since the days of Jesse Jackson was fraying.
“White voters as a whole trended toward the Democratic Party, and nonwhite voters trended away from us,” operative and Obama campaign veteran David Shor told New York.
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At the same time, Democrats gained roughly 7 points among white college graduates, they lost as many as 2 points among black voters and 9 points among Hispanics. Trump won the highest share of the Latino vote of any GOP presidential nominee since President George W. Bush was reelected in 2004.
This is counterintuitive based on Trump’s hard-line immigration stance. But many of the themes the ex-president hit relentlessly on the campaign trail, including law and order versus defund the police and the left-wing embrace of socialism, aided this shift. “What happened in 2020 is that nonwhite conservatives voted for conservatives at higher rates; they started voting more like white conservatives,” Shor said in an interview that was later tweeted out approvingly by former President Barack Obama.
The rapid leftward drift of white liberals could continue to push other voters out of the Democratic coalition to the benefit of Republicans, who are seeking to wipe out narrow majorities — the Senate is split 50-50 and only controlled by Democrats thanks to Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote — and looking for a message that appeals to both suburban and blue-collar voters.
But Republicans still have problems of their own, which have cost them the White House and both houses of Congress in four years, including continuing intraparty divisions that Trump himself is continually stoking.
“The Republican Party needs to stick to our core principles of lower taxes and economic freedom while at the same time reflecting the viewpoint with suburban and working-class voters who know that Washington is broken,” said GOP strategist Jon Gilmore. “There is plenty of blame for both parties. As a Republican, I will say our party recently had control of the White House and Congress but spent so much time infighting and not reaching across the aisle. Now is the time, even as the minority party in D.C., to demonstrate leadership and work together to restore the American dream.”
Republicans are expected to enjoy an advantage in Biden’s first midterm election. The party gained 52 House seats to take the majority for the first time in 40 years in 1994 under President Bill Clinton, then added 63 to retake the speaker’s gavel in 2010 under Obama. But Biden and the Democrats hope to prove themselves on the pandemic and present the GOP as obstructionist.
Just as some minority and younger voters turned out for Obama but failed to show up for Democrats in the midterm elections, Republicans worry about working-class voters without Trump at the top of the ticket — which only increases the importance of reversing their suburban slippage.
“It’s vital that our party not get blown out in the suburbs going forward,” said Republican strategist Matt Gorman. “Is it a balancing act? Sure. But we have a message that can appeal to both the blue-collar voting base and the suburbs. We can’t take either for granted. We can’t write off either wing.”
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While cultural issues may play differently with each group, GOP operatives are confident there are certain messages that work well with both.
“Both voters care about making sure they have good jobs, that we get life back to normal, and reopen schools,” said Gorman, a former communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “It’s not one or the other. It’s a false choice to assume it’s one or the other.”
