21 December 2018

Vox: What do the suburbs want?

Of 69 suburban districts held by the GOP before the election, just 32 will remain in Republican hands next year, according to an analysis by the Washington Post’s Dan Balz, one of our preeminent political analysts.. This might not be a temporary aberration, either; President Trump has completely overtaken the Republican Party. [...]

Suburban voters have a discrete set of economic concerns — which congressional Republicans by and large ignored. They fret about rising health care costs, either for themselves or for their aging parents, or both. They want good schools and for their children to be able to afford to go to college. They worry about the job prospects for their kids when they graduate. They are wary of extremism of any kind. [...]

But Republicans also lost where Trump had won in 2016 — like in Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District, where Tea Party hero Dave Brat fell to Democrat Abigail Spanberger. That win, Matthews said, could be attributed almost entirely to the Richmond suburbs in the district, where Democrats picked up huge margins. [...]

Trump’s approval rating is, remember, unusually low considering the economy. The president was particularly disliked by women. Trump’s approval was stuck in the 30s among those voters, and his disapproval hit the high 50s. Suburban men were more evenly divided, but many still didn’t approve of Trump. This dissatisfaction wasn’t isolated to the coasts either: Trump was deep underwater with suburban voters across the Midwest, where Republicans lost crucial Senate, governor, and House races.

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