Suburban Voters Deliver Election Warning for Trump in 2020
Suburban Voters Deliver Election Warning for Trump in 2020
(Bloomberg) -- Republicans used the Kentucky’s governor race as a test of their 2020 strategy to stoke outrage against both the Democrats’ impeachment efforts and their leftward drift -- and largely came up short.
The undoing was Governor Matt Bevin’s poor showing in the suburbs, a trend that extended to Virginia as Democrats captured full control of the state government for the first time in a quarter-century. That was boosted by the defeat of the last Republican legislator in the state’s Washington, D.C., suburbs.
While off-year local elections bear little resemblance to presidential outcomes, the results sent a pair of warnings to President Donald Trump one year before the 2020 contest. First, the House impeachment inquiry may not incite a backlash at the polls, and second, he remains deeply unpopular with educated voters in the suburbs.
“Republicans have a huge suburban problem nationwide,” said Josh Holmes, an adviser to Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader. “I don’t know if this is a permanent phenomenon because the realignment does not appear to be issue-based. It’s predominantly based on views of the president.”
Yet Holmes denied that the suburban problem was a factor in Kentucky, attributing Bevin’s apparent defeat to his personal unpopularity and noting that other GOP statewide candidates won their races comfortably.
Earlier results in Kentucky signal that governor’s races don’t necessarily translate to national contests for the White House and Senate. In 2011, Democrat Steve Beshear, the father of Bevin’s rival Andy Beshear, won the governor’s race by 20 points; three years later McConnell won the Senate race by 16 points; and two years after that, Trump carried the state by 30 points.
McConnell, who faces re-election next year, told reporters on Wednesday that Kentucky isn’t “turning blue” and that “we’re looking forward to doing well in Kentucky in 2020.”
Still, Trump bet that he could save the race by nationalizing it, visiting Lexington on Monday to rally with Bevin and warn voters that the outcome would reflect on him.
“You got to vote, because if you lose it sends a really bad message,” Trump said. “If you lose, they’re going to say: ‘Trump suffered the greatest defeat in the history of the world.’ You can’t let that happen to me!”
Following the playbook of the 2018 midterm elections that gave Democrats control of the House of Representatives, Andy Beshear focused on issues like bolstering access to health care and education. Bevin believed he could win by tying Beshear to the progressive wing of the national party and impeachment. He closely hugged Trump, even campaigning in a blue jacket covered with images of Trump’s face.
A particularly worrisome sign for the GOP came in counties like Campbell and Kenton, the suburbs of Cincinnati, which Bevin narrowly lost Tuesday after Trump won them by 25 points in 2016.
The suburban drift is deeply alarming to some Republicans, particularly those who support the party’s economic policies and judicial appointments but worry that its positioning on other issues is alienating important voters.
“The 2018 midterm results, which were confirmed by the Kentucky governor’s race, show that Republicans may be headed for extinction in the suburbs if they continue to be completely dismissive of issues like impeachment, gun control and improving health care,” said Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor and oil-and-gas executive.
The suburban shifts to Democrats are offset to a large extent by a rural exodus toward the Republican Party that put Trump in the White House and could re-elect him in 2020. His popularity in remote areas dominated by white voters without a college degree proved decisive in swing states poised to decide whether he’ll get four more years, such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Eberhart said Bevin’s defeat was “a wake-up call to Republican candidates everywhere: President Trump’s coattails may not be long enough” to save them in 2020.
In Virginia, which voted Republican in every presidential election from 1968 to 2004 and has since trended blue, Democrats seized narrow majorities in both state houses, giving them control of the next drawing of congressional district lines, further solidifying their gains.
“There’s a Trump fatigue that has set in,” Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez said at a Wednesday breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.
He attributed the results in Kentucky and Virginia to a Republican Party that is “so off the rails to the far right.”
Holmes, the Republican strategist, said he’s most troubled by local elections in the Philadelphia suburbs of Chester, Delaware and Bucks County, calling them “rock-solid Republican counties for a hundred years” that “switched decisively” on Tuesday.
In Virginia, guns were an issue for suburban voters, who increasingly favor tougher firearm laws and watched Republicans block gun control legislation.
“Virginia is a blue state in many respects now,” said Republican consultant Matt Gorman, a former aide to Jeb Bush and the GOP’s House campaign arm in 2018. “The last time we won statewide was 2009.”
--With assistance from Erik Wasson.
To contact the reporter on this story: Sahil Kapur in Washington at skapur39@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Max Berley
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