When asked at his November 7 press conference at the White House what lesson he took from the midterm elections, Donald Trump responded, “I think that people like me.” That wasn’t much of a lesson, nor was it the most obvious assessment of how the voters had spoken. Yes, Trump’s Republicans gained seats in the Senate and held on in several competitive governor’s races. But the swing of around 30 Republican-held seats to the Democrats didn’t just change control of the House of Representatives—it also suggested that a bloc of voters Trump will need to win reelection actually don’t like him very much.
In suburban areas across the country, from New York to Utah to Michigan to Virginia to Kansas, the GOP is losing support. There’s no question this has a lot to do with the president. Some of these areas are in states Trump won in 2016, some he lost, but what unites most of them is how much they look like a key part of the Republican coalition: suburban, educated, above-average wealth.
But no longer. Compare the exit polls from 2018 and the previous midterm election. In 2014, half of all college graduates voted for a Republican House candidate, while just 39 percent did so in 2018. Among white college graduates, 57 percent voted GOP in 2014 compared with only 45 percent in 2018. In 2014, voters from households making between $50,000 and $100,000 annually went for Republicans at 55 percent. Four years later, only 47 percent of those voters pulled the lever for the GOP.
What happened to Republican Karen Handel of Georgia is indicative. In 2016, her district encompassing the north side of Atlanta’s suburbs overwhelmingly reelected its Republican representative, Tom Price, by more than 20 points. (Trump, on the other hand, carried it by less than two.) After Price resigned to join Trump’s cabinet, Handel ran in an April 2017 special election that drew national attention and liberal campaign donations for her Democratic opponent. Handel won, but the GOP margin dropped by 19 points—closer to Trump’s performance a few months earlier than to Price’s.
In 2018, Handel faced a strong Democratic opponent in gun-control activist Lucy McBath, and the benefits of incumbency seem to have deserted her. The portions of the district in Cobb and Fulton counties are the most Republican-friendly, and in 2016 Price won both with over 60 percent of the vote. He even won in Democratic-heavy DeKalb County. In 2018, Handel lost big in DeKalb, won just 55 percent in Cobb, barely edged out McBath in Fulton—and lost the race by one point. It’s no coincidence that at the top of the ticket, Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp made little effort to contest these inner suburbs. He lost Handel’s district by about 14,000 votes. Greg Bluestein of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the Kemp campaign “avoided” the metro Atlanta area in favor of maximizing turnout in the state’s rural counties. The Trump-aligned Kemp won statewide while still losing the suburbs. Handel was not so fortunate.
This is a culmination of the strategy Trump brought to his adopted party: actively court the white working-class voter. These blue-collar conservatives had been skeptical of the plutocratic Mitt Romney and the conventional GOP agenda four years earlier, went the thinking, while a straight-talker with a populist agenda could add them to a successful Republican coalition. The new strategy still requires keeping the existing members of the coalition in the tent, however, especially the suburbanites.
But there’s a problem: These suburban voters are not Trump’s base. In many ways they are the segment of the party Trump’s candidacy was designed to ignore, downplay, or even antagonize. Republicans in these districts aren’t as alarmed by immigration. They prefer the benefits of global trade to the protections of tariffs. They bristle at Trump’s coarse style of politics that punches first and asks questions later. For these voters, civility and moral leadership are more than just niceties—they’re motivating issues. The message Trump and the GOP send, either incidentally or intentionally, is that these Americans matter less. Increasingly, they’re listening.
In a perfect demonstration of how the Trump-led Republican party thinks of these voters, the president used his post-election press conference to name and shame those GOP House members who have been most skeptical of Trump and who lost in their suburban districts. Their problem? They didn’t “want the embrace” of Trump:
Post-midterms, Trump gets a House conference that’s more amenable to him—but one in the minority, without any real power. Maybe the Trumpian GOP believes it no longer needs suburban voters in its coalition to win in 2020. Maybe, as happened in the statewide Senate and gubernatorial races where the GOP overshot expectations, Republicans will be able to grind out future reelection victories. But it’s also possible that this year’s unhappy suburban voters are the first sign of a weakening Republican coalition, one that might not end up liking Trump as much in 2020 as he will need them to.
