SEA ISLAND, Ga. — Republican guru Karl Rove is sounding the alarm after steep losses in suburbs across America cost his party control of the House of Representatives.
Rove, chief adviser to George W. Bush during his two winning presidential campaigns, said recapturing the House and holding the White House would be challenging for Republicans if they continue to bleed support in suburban House districts. The Republicans lost dozens of suburban seats in the midterm elections, as voters traditionally friendly to the GOP defected to the Democratic Party in a sharp rebuke of President Trump.
“We’ve got to be worried about what’s happening in the suburbs. We get wiped out in the Dallas suburbs, Houston suburbs, Chicago suburbs, Denver suburbs — you know there’s a pattern — Detroit suburbs, Minneapolis suburbs, Orange County, Calif., suburbs,” Rove said Saturday during a panel discussion for the Washington Examiner’s Sea Island Summit.
“When we start to lose in the suburbs, it says something to us,” Rove continued. “We can’t replace all of those people by simply picking up [Minnesota’s First Congressional District] — farm country and the Iron range of Minnesota — because, frankly, there’s more growth in suburban areas than there is in rural areas.”
Trump has been spectacular at juicing voter turnout for the Republican Party in exurban communities and rural territory.
In 2016, that support helped him win the presidency; and last week, it secured the Senate majority, lifting Republicans in key Senate races in Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, and possibly Arizona and Florida. Each of those states has influential blocs of voters attracted to Trump’s brand of culture war politics and who prioritize issues like border security and gun rights.
But the president’s impact on his party in affluent suburbs that typically vote Republican has been disastrous. The first sign of trouble emerged two years ago,
Democrat Hillary Clinton won two-dozen Republican-held House districts, although Republicans did well enough in suburbia overall to maintain control of Congress and win the White House. Last week, the bottom dropped out. Suburban voters gave Republicans the boot, as frustration with Trump’s provocative behavior and coarse rhetoric overrode the benefits many are reaping from the growing economy.
With votes still to count, Democrats were on track to pick up nearly 40 House seats; they needed only 23 to flip the House.
“We’ve got to examine the reasons why we lost and figure out how to fix those problems going forward,” Rove said. “Problematically, the purple places, with the exception of Florida, didn’t go blue, but they got bluer.”
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, joined Rove on the panel to review the midterm elections and preview 2020. The Republican’s old Georgia House seat, suburban Atlanta’s Sixth Congressional District, went Democratic for the first time since he flipped it in1978. Trump garnered just 48 percent of the vote there in 2016, defeating Clinton by just 1 point.
Gingrich argued that the midterm election was not a repudiation of Trump on par with the rebukes suffered by Presidents Barack Obama in 2010 and Bill Clinton in 1994.
“If you compare this election with Obama in 2010, they got beat much worse,” Gingrich said. “Trump did much better — literally, Obama got beaten about twice as bad as Trump.” In Obama’s first midterm election, the Republicans turned 63 Democratic-held House seats and gained seven Senate seats.
However, the former speaker and 2012 presidential contender was highly critical of Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s gubernatorial campaign, which relied heavily on Trump.
Kemp, a Republican, leads Democrat Stacey Abrams, the former minority leader of the Georgia state House, who refuses to concede. Gingrich said Kemp paid too much attention to the strong GOP vote in South Georgia and ran a campaign about small ideas, ignoring Atlanta, where most of the votes, and the sort of ambitious policies that might have appealed to them.
“Brian Kemp, who did a very effective job in the primary, ran a primary election in the general election,” Gingrich explained. “He spent almost no energy trying to reach suburban and exurban women and he came close to losing.”
