It would be bad enough for the Republican Party if that had been a temporary setback. But with the prospect of a second consecutive collapse in the suburbs this year, it is beginning to look like a total retreat.
“We cannot give up more ground in the suburbs nationally without having a real problem for our party,” said Charles Hellwig, former chairman of the Republican Party in Wake County, North Carolina, describing a picture in which “every year, every month, every day, we get a little bit bluer. “
It is the same story in the suburbs everywhere. In a Fox News poll last weekend, Trump was following Joe Biden, the alleged Democratic candidate, by 11 percentage points in the suburbs. An ABC News / Washington Post poll sent Trump down 9 percentage points there – bigger margins in the suburbs than exit polls have recorded since the 1980s, when Republicans were winning there by double digits.
That poll reflects a dramatic change from 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the suburbs by 4 percentage points. Trump’s erosion in the suburbs is one of the main reasons this year’s electoral map has expanded for Democrats in recent weeks, with Trump in danger not only of losing, but of taking the Senate with him. And demographic shifts are increasingly favorable to Democrats. Suburbs are growing rapidly, and by 2018, according to Pew, people of color made up nearly a third of the suburban population.
“The suburban voter movement, particularly educated women and millennials who are so progressive in their politics, increased voter turnout among Latinos and African Americans,” said Bill Carrick, a Democratic strategist who led the 1988 presidential campaign for Missouri Representative Dick Gephardt . “All of that contributes to this geography: suddenly, we have Georgia and Texas and Florida and Arizona, Iowa. There are many places at stake.”
Trump’s damage to the suburbs comes primarily, as he has elsewhere, from his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. But Trump’s response to George Floyd’s protests also appears to have hurt him in the suburbs: His militant reaction crashed into an electorate that is less white and insular than half a century ago, when Richard Nixon did a rhetorical “law and order” job. ” .
Trump’s intervention in Portland, Oregon, has attracted plus people on the streets, not least, including clashes between not only the Trump administration and antifa, but also a “mothers wall”.
Comparing the new voter registry in 17 states from before Floyd’s protests began to the following week, Democratic data firm TargetSmart found that youth and people of color were registering at higher rates than before, with years to cast votes for Democrats still ahead of them.
In Ohio, voters under 25 accounted for 34 percent of new registrants in the first week of June, up from 23 percent the previous week, said Tom Bonier, CEO of TargetSmart. He saw similar trends in North Carolina and even in heavily Republican states like Missouri and Oklahoma.
“Literally every state that is seeing these increases, which is not something we saw in 2018,” Bonier said. “It is interesting to see how the protests are playing in cities across the country. … Suburban voters seem to be more sympathetic to these protests than ever before. ”
When asked in an ABC News / Washington Post poll who they trusted most to handle crime and security-related issues, they preferred Biden to Trump 50 to 41 percent.
Ed Bruley, chairman of the Democratic Party in the working-class suburbs of Macomb County in Michigan, said that even compared to four or five years ago, voters in his county have become more sensitive to racial justice issues, in largely due to the proliferation of video, such as Floyd’s death.
“With today’s videos,” he said, “everyone can have an emotional experience about it. He is no longer an academic. “
Former Republican Rep. Ryan Costello, who represented the Philadelphia suburbs, said at Floyd’s protests: “There was an opportunity in the riots and in the dismantling of police-type things.”
However, he said, “I think these things happen so fast that ultimately Trump is back in history.” The president would have been better off, he said, if the focus had remained on “what the left is doing,” not on Trump, whom he said “has deteriorated in the suburbs.”
Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Trump’s re-election effort, said polls showing Trump battling in the suburbs overemphasize Democrats or Republicans, and that in the campaign poll itself, Trump “remains strong” in a career in the one that the Trump campaign is just beginning to define Biden.
Several Republican Party officials have said in recent days that they suspect Murtaugh is right. In North Carolina, Hellwig said he hopes Trump’s public safety appeals will finally resonate with suburban voters, inviting them to associate Democrats with “the worst things that are happening across the country in terms of violence and protests. turn into riots. “
