The initial takeaway from last week’s election results was that Republicans have lost considerable ground in the higher-income, well-educated suburban areas that have been the party’s backbone for decades. With a more complete map of called House races, we can see exactly how devastating the GOP’s slippage in these parts of the country has been.
By my count, Republicans have lost 31 House seats in what might be considered suburban districts. All are at or above the national average for median income, higher-education attainment, or both. That list includes three in New Jersey, one in New York, four in Pennsylvania, three in Virginia, two in Michigan, two in Illinois, one in South Carolina, one in Georgia, two in Florida, two in Minnesota, two in Texas, one in Oklahoma, one in Kansas, one in Colorado, one in Arizona, three in California, and one in Washington state.
This does not include a handful of districts where the Republican candidate is losing but the race has not yet been called, such as Mia Love in the Salt Lake City suburbs or Tom MacArthur in South Jersey. Nor does it include numerous suburban districts where Republican incumbents held on but ran awfully close races—like Rob Woodall of Georgia, George Holding on North Carolina, Kenny Marchant of Texas, Mimi Walters of California, or Andy Barr of Kentucky.
Needless to say, the Democrats can attribute their taking of the House majority to winning these districts, many of which had in 2016 split their ballots by voting for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. That split might reflect what voters in the suburbs reasonably thought they might be getting: a Democratic president and a Republican House, divided government. The 2018 midterms might be seen as a correction, giving America a Democratic House to rein in a Republican president.
Trump’s Republicans have a problem in the suburbs, but does it spell certain doom for Trump in 2020? Look where many of these districts are. Some are in solidly Democratic states like California or New Jersey, while others are in solidly Republican ones, like Oklahoma and South Carolina. When it comes to presidential races, you don’t have to win the suburbs to win the state outright and collect all the electoral votes.
What about the swingier states? Trump may lose the suburbs for the GOP but gain enough rural and blue-collar voters to offset them, especially in the Midwestern states in which he edged out Clinton in 2016. David Byler points out this is a mixed bag for Trump—Michigan looks like it could really be trending more swing, and more attainable for Trump and the GOP, than Pennsylvania.
But even if Trump can eke out another Electoral College victory by shedding the marginal suburban votes for greater rural turnout, that doesn’t solve his House problem. Congressional majorities are built on broader coalitions than the narrowest possible paths to the presidency. Democrats learned this the hard way when, in 2010, the party was wiped out (outside of majority-black districts) in the South. Barack Obama did what no other modern president had done by shrinking his popular vote total while still winning re-election in 2012. But Democrats never won back the House for the rest of Obama’s presidency, and his legislative agenda was effectively dead.
If the GOP hopes to be back in the driver’s seat on Capitol Hill in a hypothetical second Trump term, the party (and the president) will have to figure out how to reverse the trend in the suburbs.
