A Democratic ticket led by Bernie Sanders would solve President Trump’s most concerning November liability — the leftward drift of suburban voters that has plagued the Republican Party since 2016, GOP strategists say.
Many affluent, college-educated suburbanites are uneasy with Trump and want to oust him. But polling and focus groups are showing even stiffer resistance to key elements of Sanders’s agenda, particularly plans for national healthcare and to raise taxes dramatically. That reveals how toxic the Vermont senator is for Democrats in battlegrounds where they have steadily gained strength — and why Republicans are salivating over the prospect of his nomination.
“Is Bernie the best thing that could happen to us? Yes,” Republican strategist Liesl Hickey told the Washington Examiner on Friday. “Suburban voters don’t want a revolution.”
Sanders, 78, describes himself as a Democratic socialist. Republicans have, for years, attempted to tar their Democratic opponents with the socialist label, often to minimal effect. But as Sanders has emerged as the front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary, suburban voters are taking a closer look at his proposals and listening to his criticism of American society and the country’s foundational principles. And they’re balking.
Sanders wants to abolish private healthcare and force Americans to obtain insurance from the federal government. Suburbanites want cost relief and other reforms. Yet, overall, voters who tend to be the most satisfied with their healthcare plans are upscale suburban dwellers, and they have no interest in losing access to private coverage. Sanders’s plan to hike taxes on income and investment could also soften their opposition to Trump.
Under Sanders, suburbanites could get hit with a marginal tax rate of nearly 70% on income and investments. Combined with fears about how a Sanders presidency would impact the stock market and the broader economy, Trump’s occasionally off-putting conduct becomes the less problematic choice. Additionally, suburban voters generally reject Sanders’s denunciation of American capitalism and assertion that “America is a racist country top to bottom,” uttered in a recent Democratic debate.
“He would lose badly here, and in fact, he could jeopardize our status as a purple state,” said Brian Murray, a Republican consultant in Phoenix. Arizona is an emerging swing state, electing a Democrat to the Senate in 2018 for the first time in a generation in a midterm rebuke of Trump. But Murray said Sanders would push the state firmly into Trump’s camp. “His agenda is so radical it would drive even [rural] Democrats away,” he said.
Trump captured critical swing states in the Midwest nearly four years ago by winning blue-collar voters who had typically supported Democrats. But two years later, the Democrats won control of the House and flipped Senate seats in Arizona and Nevada by harnessing a suburban revolt against Trump that stretched from Orange County, California, to neighborhoods around Atlanta. At issue was not necessarily the president’s policies so much as his conduct and rhetoric.
Against Sanders, Republican insiders are predicting a suburban sweep that would practically guarantee Trump a second term.
Party strategists expect Sanders’s image to become so polarizing, that the president will move Nevada and New Hampshire, which backed Hillary Clinton, into his column. Republicans argue that in a Sanders-Trump matchup, the president would win on the strength of suburban gains around Las Vegas, Reno, and GOP-leaning communities in Southern New Hampshire that have strayed from the party since 2016.
[Read more: ‘He is like me’: Trump explains why Sanders would be his toughest opponent]
