CityLab: More Americans Are Leaving Cities, But Don’t Call It an Urban Exodus

 A year into the Covid-19 pandemic, after much speculation about emptied downtowns and the prospect of remote work, the clearest picture yet is emerging about how people moved. There is no urban exodus; perhaps it’s more of an urban shuffle. Despite talk of mass moves to Florida and Texas, data shows most people who did move stayed close to where they came from—although Sun Belt regions that were popular even before the pandemic did see gains.

Across the U.S., the number of people making moves that they defined as permanent was up a modest 3% between March 2020 and February 2021. Even with that increase, national migration rates are likely still at historic lows. But zoom in to a few of America’s densest and most expensive metro regions and the picture is more dramatic, with the percentage increase in moves well into the double digits.

Those Americans who did move accelerated a trend that predates the pandemic: Dense core counties of major U.S. metro areas saw a net decrease in flow into the city, while other suburbs and some smaller cities saw net gains. In other words, people moved outward. Outward to the suburbs of their own core metro area, but also farther out, to satellite cities or even other major urban centers that might still give people proximity to their region. As CityLab contributor Richard Florida has noted, the pandemic compressed into a matter of months moves that might have happened in the next few years anyway. [...]

Even for people who said their moves were permanent, wealth was the dominant explanation for the jump in moves in New York City’s five boroughs. While people across incomes continued to move around as they had before the pandemic, it was higher-income zip codes that saw a sharp change in movement at the height of the pandemic.

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CNBC: Trump underperformed in most counties where he held large rallies

 There were 30 Trump campaign stops in that period, according to an NBC News tally, in states from Arizona to Nebraska to Pennsylvania. In five counties that Trump visited he saw better results than he did in 2016, but in the remaining 25 his margins of victory got smaller, his margin of defeat grew or the county flipped Democratic. [...]

Crowd sizes are often held out as a way to gauge support for a politician, and sometimes they are. But during a pandemic, with a polarizing candidate on the stump, it’s possible the meaning of the rallies were misread. While the crowds were visible sign of enthusiasm for Trump, there were much bigger, and less visible, groups of people who were not at the rallies and who may have seen them in a negative light. [...]

To be clear, none of this is provable. These are correlations, not one-for-one causal relationships. Trump’s rallies may have helped him, even in the places where he underperformed in 2020. Maybe they prevented him from doing worse.

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Politico: ‘It’s a big, big swing’: Trump loses ground with white voters

 But the president is tilting at the margins with those groups. His bigger problem is the demographic that sent him to the White House — white voters, whose embrace of Trump appears to be slipping in critical, predominantly white swing states. [...]

But Trump is working from a disadvantage this year. There are relatively few undecided voters left to persuade. Democrats are also highly energized about the Supreme Court. And Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the court one month before the midterm elections two year ago did nothing to stop Democrats from steamrolling Trump and the GOP.

The erosion of Trump’s white support — and its significance to the November outcome — was never more obvious than in Trump’s messaging in recent days. Last week, he called for the creation of a commission to promote “patriotic education,” while dismissing “critical race theory” and the 1619 project of The New York Times Magazine. At a rally in Mosinee, Wis., he lit into Kamala Harris — the first major party woman of color vice presidential nominee — lamenting the possibility of her becoming president “through the back door.”[...]

Trump is doing better with whites in some states than others. In North Carolina, he is drawing noncollege-educated white voters at about the same levels he was in 2016. But in other states, including some with sizable populations of people of color, he is underperforming with whites. In Florida, Trump is running ahead of Biden with white voters 56 percent to 39 percent, according to a Monmouth University poll. But that is far short of the 32 percentage-point margin he posted in 2016. In Arizona, he has seen his 14-point edge with white voters in 2016 cut as well. [...]

Even if the result is a margin of victory with noncollege-educated white voters that is smaller than it was four years ago, Trump will almost certainly carry that group. And if he can turn them out in greater numbers, he could shift the electorate toward him in several predominantly white states. Republicans and Democrats alike estimate there are hundreds of thousands of unregistered, noncollege-educated whites in key swing states that Trump could still pick up.

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FiveThirtyEight: Election Update: Polls Are Good For Biden Pretty Much Everywhere — Except Florida (SEP. 9, 2020)

 But even though the topline numbers haven’t changed all that much, that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been some movement at the state level. It’s not super easy to find patterns where Biden is gaining or losing ground — still a lot of noise at this point — but it does seem as if, on the whole, there’s been mostly good news for Biden. Except for Florida, which, as you can see in the chart below, is where Trump has closed the gap the most.

And at this point, though, it’s really only Florida that’s moved all that much. In most other states which have been polled about as much as Florida — there’ve been 12 polls there since the start of the Democratic convention — they’ve seen far less of a change or barely any movement at all. Four other states have at least 10 polls in the same timeframe — Pennsylvania (17 polls), Wisconsin (12), Michigan (10) and North Carolina (10) — yet their numbers have budged only a little.1 What’s more, it’s mostly good news for Biden at this point. [...]

As for what’s happening in Florida, we’re still a little unsure of what to make of it, as we’d expect the numbers in fellow Sun Belt states Arizona and Texas to have moved in similar ways — but they haven’t. Some of this might have to do with Florida’s Hispanic population, however. Whereas Mexican Americans comprise more than 80 percent of the Hispanic population in Arizona and Texas, Cuban Americans form a plurality — 29 percent — of Florida Hispanics, and on the whole they are much more conservative.

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FiveThirtyEight: Biden’s Polling Lead Is Big — And Steady

Over the past month, Biden’s lead over Trump has been both incredibly stable and unusually large. Amidst Trump’s unpopular handling of the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd, Biden’s lead has hovered within a tight band of 8.9 to 9.6 percentage points since mid-June, according to FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average. 

This is a sizable enough lead that Trump’s reelection chances are in a precarious position. Take what CNN analyst and FiveThirtyEight alum Harry Enten found earlier this month when he looked back at presidential elections where an incumbent was running since 1940. He calculated, on average, a 7-point difference between the final national popular vote margin and the polls conducted four months out. That might sound like a lot of movement — and it is — but the problem for Trump is even if the polls swung toward him by 7 points, he would still trail Biden by about 2 to 3 points nationally. The median difference Enten found, 4.5 points, would leave Trump in even worse shape. [...]

Additionally, Trump got a few favorable polls in Florida and Pennsylvania. In surveys conducted just before the Fourth of July, Trafalgar Group found Trump tied with Biden in Florida and trailing Biden by just 5 points in Pennsylvania. That might not sound like particularly good news for Trump in Pennsylvania, but considering Biden’s average lead there is more than 7 points, anything that shows that lead waning is a win for Trump. However, the fact that Trafalgar is a Republican pollster with a slight bias toward the GOP isn’t great news for Trump, as in many ways these polls offer his best-case scenario, and that scenario still isn’t very good. It has Trump either barely breaking even (Florida) or still underwater (Pennsylvania).

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FiveThirtyEight: New Polling Shows Trump’s Electoral College Advantage Is Slipping

The Times/Siena is one of the most highly-rated pollsters in FiveThirtyEight’s Pollster Ratings — one of six with an A+ mark — so these new surveys did adjust our averages a bit, most notably in Pennsylvania. There had been few high-quality polls conducted in the Keystone State, so our polling average did shift roughly 1.5 points in Biden’s favor because of the Times/Siena survey, which found Biden up by 10 points.

It wasn’t just the Times/Siena survey that found Biden up, either. We got two more polls of Pennsylvania today that showed Biden with double-digit leads. One from GOP pollster Hodas & Associates gave Biden a 12-point lead, and one from Redfield & Wilton Strategies put him up 10 points. [...]

But perhaps what’s even more significant about this batch of recent polls is that Trump’s possible Electoral College advantage is slipping. Biden doesn’t lead by as much in most of the battleground states as he does nationally, but his leads are big enough — anywhere from 5 points in Arizona to 9 points in Nevada — that it won’t matter that many battleground states lean to the right of the country.[...]

And the fact that Biden now has multiple paths to the White House is the biggest problem facing Trump. He needs a notable shift in voter sentiment that makes the national environment less favorable for Biden. With four months to go, that’s quite possible, but at the moment, our polling averages suggest that he’s in a lot of trouble.

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Mish Talk: Trump is Trailing Badly in All Recent Florida Polls: Why?

Biden tops Trump by 9 points, 49-40 percent, in a Fox News survey of Florida registered voters. That’s up from a 3-point edge in April (46-43 percent). [...]

The former vice president owes his advantage to the backing of Hispanics (+17 points), women (+18 points), and Millennials born between 1981 and 1996 (+30).

Some groups that are key to a Trump reelection split down the middle, including men (46 Biden vs. 44 Trump) and voters ages 65 and over (47-48 percent) -- Trump’s 8-point edge among white voters (42-50 percent) also trails expectations. [...]

It is by no means impossible for Trump to win. I have Trump's odds at about 30%.

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FiveThirtyEight: The Latest Swing State Polls Look Good For Biden

In Michigan, the most notable result comes from long-time Michigan pollster EPIC/MRA, which found Biden up by 12 points in a poll conducted between late May and early June, 53 percent to 41 percent. For context, in 2016 the pollster never found Hillary Clinton with more than 47 percent in a single general election poll. However, in Wisconsin, Biden’s lead might not be that secure. The Marquette Law School Poll — often seen as the gold standard in the Badger State — had Biden up only 3 points in early May, 46 percent to 43 percent. Biden and Trump also ran about even in Pennsylvania, another pivotal state in 2016, which might seem at odds with the data from Michigan and Wisconsin. But unlike those states, Pennsylvania didn’t have any surveys from highly rated pollsters, and what they found was a bit noisy — two put Trump up by 4 to 5 points, while another put Biden ahead by 9 points. We wouldn’t read too much into this yet without higher quality polling, but the inconsistent results here could be evidence that Pennsylvania will remain competitive.

As for the polling picture in the Sun Belt states — Arizona, Georgia and Texas — they all seemed more or less in line with what you would expect, once you account for Biden’s lead in the national polls and how these states voted in 2016. But they do signal potential trouble for Trump. For instance, the fact that Trump carried Arizona by 3.5 points in 2016 seems to have been erased by Biden’s polling lead. On average, Biden led by 3 points, including a high-quality early June survey from Fox News that showed him up 4 points. In Georgia and Texas, on the other hand, Trump was still in the lead, by 1 and 2 points, respectively. Yet this is not as cushy of a margin as one would expect for Trump, considering he carried Georgia by 5 points and Texas by 9 points in 2016. If this trio of states are all in play — and Arizona is possibly even leaning Democratic — that would give Biden many additional paths to 270 electoral votes. [...]

There are two big takeaways here. One, Biden is in an enviable position in many of these battleground states. However, the second takeaway — which is the caveat we mentioned earlier — is that all of these battleground states save Michigan are more Republican-leaning than the national average. In other words, most of the states that will decide the presidential election are to the right of the country as a whole, and that speaks to Trump’s advantage in the Electoral College. Should Biden continue to hold a sizable lead, the chances of an Electoral College-popular vote split will probably be low. But if the polls get closer, the odds will increase because the eventual tipping point state is almost certainly among these eight states. But as it stands now, if Trump carries Arizona along with every state that’s more Republican-leaning in those recent polls, he would almost certainly win the presidency.

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Associated Press: States accused of fudging or bungling COVID-19 testing data

In Florida, the data scientist who developed the state’s coronavirus dashboard, Rebekah Jones, said this week that she was fired for refusing to manipulate data “to drum up support for the plan to reopen.” Calls to health officials for comment were not immediately returned Tuesday.

In Georgia, one of the earliest states to ease up on lockdowns and assure the public it was safe to go out again, the Department of Public Health published a graph around May 11 that showed new COVID-19 cases declining over time in the most severely affected counties. The daily entries, however, were not arranged in chronological order but in descending order. [...]

Guidelines from the Trump administration say that before states begin reopening, they should see a 14-day downward trend in infections. However, some states have reopened when infections were still climbing or had plateaued. States have also been instructed to expand testing and contact tracing.[...]

Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said a lot of these cases are not necessarily the result of any attempt to fool the public. For example, she said, states may not have updated information systems that allow them to tell the difference between an antibody test and a viral test.

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Time: The coronavirus is causing Trump's supporters to abandon him

One of the defining questions of the 2020 election is how many Trump voters feel in November like Heidi and Dennis Hodges do now. Over the past four years, Trump has developed a Teflon mystique: no matter what he says or does, nothing seems to stick to him. Predicting that the latest outrage will finally sever his bond with supporters has been a mug’s game. And even as the coronavirus crisis escalated in March and April, there have been few signs that this is changing: 93% of self-described Republicans said during the first half of April that they approved of Trump’s performance, according to Gallup—up two points from a month prior.

Yet there is also little question that the pandemic has transformed the election. Two months ago, Trump was an incumbent president riding a strong economy and a massive cash advantage; today, he looks like an underdog in November. The RealClearPolitics polling average has former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, leading Trump 48.3% to 42% nationally. Trump’s prospects aren’t any brighter right now when broken down by states that were key to his 2016 victory. According to Real Clear Politics polling averages, Biden leads Trump by 6.7 points in Pennsylvania, 5.5 in Michigan, and 2.7 points in Wisconsin. Biden is also leading Trump narrowly in Florida and Arizona. [...]

Republican strategists note the pendulum could easily swing back in Trump’s direction before the election. “Three months ago we were all certain that this election was going to be about impeachment, and three months before that it was all going to be about the border wall,” says Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and co-author of The Great Revolt. But he sees signs of trouble in the polling of voters who dislike both candidates. In 2016, those voters picked Trump; in 2020, they favor Biden. “It is a warning sign” for Trump, Todd says.

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Vox: Governors are starting to close their borders. The implications are staggering

As the Supreme Court recognized more than 170 years ago, “we are one people with one common country. We are all citizens of the United States, and as members of the same community must have the right to pass and repass through every part of it without interruption, as freely as in our own states.” The right of all US citizens to travel freely among the states, the Court later explained in United States v. Guest (1966), “was conceived from the beginning to be a necessary concomitant of the stronger union the Constitution created.” [...]

Thus, there are two potential reasons why Abbott’s order may be legitimate. The first is that it applies to Texans and non-Texans alike — a Houston resident who returns home from a trip to Newark will spend two weeks in isolation, just like a New York resident who travels to Dallas to visit a family member. The second is that Abbott has a “substantial reason” for imposing this order. He believes that it will reduce the number of people who enter Texas carrying a terrible disease. [...]

The premise of Edwards — indeed, the premise of the post-New Deal order — is that the federal government would provide a baseline of health, prosperity, and security to the nation as a whole. In return, the states would give up their role as the sole providers of “assistance to the needy,” and with it their power to close their borders to poor Americans.

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The Daily Wire: Will Trump Win? The Latest On Trump’s National And State-By-State Approval Ratings

Historically, presidents have fared well in re-election campaigns when they maintain approval ratings above 50%. This president, to be sure, has never had such an approval rating at any point throughout his presidency. But President Trump oversees a soaring economy, with record-low unemployment rates, and has a hardened base of core supporters. One must also never forget the sheer power of incumbency: Since FDR, only Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were elected and then subsequently not re-elected four years later. [...]

The Daily Wire will be tracking Trump's state-by-state approval rating as the general election nears. Here is the latest Trump approval rating information from across all the various swing states.

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City Beautiful: What is New Urbanism?

Reuters: Florida county cannot ban invocations by atheists: U.S. appeals court

A federal appeals court on Monday declared a Florida county’s ban on atheists and other non-religious groups from giving invocations before public meetings unconstitutional, even as it ordered the narrowing of an injunction against the practice. [...]

Citing U.S. Supreme Court precedents, Marcus said the law was clear that sectarian prayer was allowed, but Brevard County’s practice “is unconstitutional and must be rejected.”

Marcus singled out county officials who testified they would bar prayers from deists, Wiccans, Rastafarians and polytheists, and would have to think “long and hard” before inviting Hindus, Sikhs or followers of Native-American religions.

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CityLab: Texas High Speed Rail Faces a New Threat: Semantics

The terminology is important for reasons beyond its own sake. Being a railroad or not determines whether Texas Central is entitled to use eminent domain as it surveys and acquires property. State law allows railroads and certain other private companies to use eminent domain to seize land for projects in the public interest. But in February, in response to a lawsuit by a landowning couple in rural Leon County, a district court ruled that Texas Central did not have that right. The firm is “not a railroad or interurban electric company,” the judge stated, because it hasn’t laid track or run a train yet.

Texas Central contends that it is indeed a railroad, and points to an earlier court decision from Harris County where a judge said so. The company says it would prefer to acquire privately held land through amicably struck commercial sales, and has already secured more than 30 percent of the land in its preferred right-of-way. But in the all-but inevitable event that it can’t seal 100 percent of those deals, it plans to keep fighting the Leon County case in court to secure those eminent domain rights, Holley Reed, the managing director of external affairs at Texas Central, told CityLab. [...]

But the Texas Central project differs from California’s high-speed rail in many ways. Chiefly, it is an investor-backed undertaking, not a publicly subsidized project. Texas Central has said that it plans to spend more than $15 billion to build and run its planned 240-mile route from Houston to Dallas, in partnership with Central Japan Railway, which will help implement the shinkansen technology. Construction won’t begin until funding in full has been raised among investors, the firm promises (one bill moving through the Texas legislature would codify that promise in law). Citigroup and Mitsubishi are advising its intricate financing structure, and Renfe, the Spanish rail operator, has signed on to run the trains. Texas Central company might apply for federal loans, but the project won’t be funded by state or federal grants. [...]

It’s hard to dispute that the project is indeed risky in some basic respects, though. The United States has never seen a privately operated high-speed rail line; Florida’s partially opened, investor-backed Brightline project in Florida—now dubbed Virgin Trains USA—is the closest example, but it has the major advantage of using an existing right-of-way and is still a ways from judgment. And it’s true that few rail lines around the world operate successfully on ticket sales alone. (Even Japan’s rail systems, which are unusually profitable, make a big chunk of proceeds from shrewd station planning and advertising.) In the U.S., the best-performing passenger train routes link the densely packed cities of the Northeast Corridor, which have extensive public transit networks. Neither Houston or Dallas particularly qualify on that front. “This is Texas. People have pickup trucks and want to drive cars,” Workman said. “This is the recipe for the worst, most colossal failure financially.”

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Vox: How the Parkland shooting changed America’s gun debate

According to the Giffords Law Center (which supports stricter gun laws), 26 states and Washington, DC, enacted a total of 67 new gun control laws this year — more than triple the number of stricter gun laws enacted in 2017. The 2018 measures include a higher minimum age to buy guns, restrictions for domestic abusers, “red flag” laws that let law enforcement take away guns from people deemed a risk, and new urban gun violence reduction programs.

Some of these passed in states with Republican leaders. In Florida, the GOP-controlled legislature and Republican Gov. Rick Scott approved legislation that raised the minimum age to buy guns and added a waiting period for firearm purchases, among other changes. In Vermont, Republican Gov. Phil Scott signed gun control laws that included expanded background checks and a “red flag” law.

At the same time, there was a decrease in the number of new laws loosening access to guns. So Parkland didn’t just apparently inspire more support for gun control; it also led to less support for new, less-restrictive gun laws. [...]

When it comes to overall support for stronger gun laws, there was a significant spike shortly after Parkland: Based on Gallup’s surveys, support for stricter gun laws in March 2018 hit 67 percent, up from 55 percent in October 2016 and 60 percent in October 2017 (after the Las Vegas mass shooting). But that support dropped by October this year to 61 percent — still higher than it was previously, but not that far off historical levels. [...]

The problem, then, has never been whether a majority of Americans support gun control. The problem, instead, is what’s known as the intensity gap: Essentially, even though more Americans support gun control laws, those on the side opposing stricter measures have long been more passionate about the issue — more likely to make guns the one issue they vote on, more likely to call their representatives in Congress, and so on.

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The New York Times: Rick Scott Wins Florida Senate Race After Recount

The win in Florida gives Republicans a 52-to-47 margin in the Senate. If the party also retains the Senate seat in Mississippi after a Nov. 27 runoff, it will have a 53-to-47 edge, a two-seat pickup for the 2018 cycle. [...]

For now, Republicans will savor another victory by Mr. Scott, who has mastered the ability to eke out wins. No politician in the state’s recent history has as enviable a record: Mr. Scott is unbeaten in three consecutive statewide contests, two for governor and one for senator.

His margin has shrunk with each victory — he beat Alex Sink by 1.2 percentage points in 2010, Charlie Crist by 1 point in 2014, and Mr. Nelson by 0.1 of a point. But this year, for the first time, he obtained a majority of the vote, 50.1 percent.

Behind Mr. Scott’s victories lies his vast personal wealth. He and his wife, Ann, put more than $70 million into his first campaign for governor and nearly $13 million into his second; this year, Mr. Scott spent more than $50 million on the Senate race. But as a candidate, Mr. Scott, who is not known for his charisma, did more than just open his checkbook: He campaigned incessantly and stayed relentlessly on message, casting Mr. Nelson as a do-nothing has-been who had to be retired. [...]

During the campaign, Mr. Scott carefully distanced himself from Mr. Trump in an election that turned heavily on voters’ dislike for the president’s administration. Over the course of his eight years as governor, he also tempered his Tea Party conservatism somewhat, shifting to support more moderate measures on guns and immigration. But he embraced Mr. Trump’s bombastic style after Election Day, when it came to claiming rampant fraud nobody could prove.

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The Guardian: Donald Trump's unchecked hold on power has come to an end

The exit polls gave Democrats a massive 21-point advantage among women, while Republicans scored just a two-point lead among men. White women split 50-48 for the anti-Trump movement known as Democrats. The only age group that Republicans won were 65 and older – and that was only by one point.

Just two years ago, in those same exit polls, white women gave Trump a nine-point lead over the first woman to hold a major party’s presidential nomination. Married women were pretty divided in 2016, but leaned heavily towards Democrats on Tuesday. [...]

Republicans should have sailed to victory at a time of relative peace and prosperity, with unemployment at historic lows and wages rising. But in the House – a truly national contest, unlike the US Senate – voters showed there were clear electoral limits to Trump’s rabidly anti-immigrant racism and stunningly shameless sexism.[...]

In Florida, where the Democratic disappointment in the Senate and governor’s races was profound, the changes are coming. A state that just decided two contests by less than 100,000 votes also decided to restore voting rights to 1.4 million former felons.

Yes, Ron DeSantis won the governorship despite his close ties to white nationalists. He’ll need many more of the white-sheet gang once those former felons start voting. Meanwhile, Kris Kobach in Kansas, running with the support of similarly racist friends, failed to win the governorship in a state that Trump won by more than 20 points.

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CNN: 7 takeaways from election night 2018

House Democrats placed a MASSIVE bet on women in their plan to retake the majority. Dozens and dozens of Democratic female candidates jumped into races across the country. Democrats tailored much of their messaging on health care, on taxes, on everything to female voters -- especially in the suburbs. That was clearly the right bet. Women made up 52% of the overall electorate, according to preliminary exit polls, and they went for Democratic candidates over Republicans by 20. According to the Cook Political Report's Dave Wasserman, there will now be more than 100 women in the House in 2019 for the first time in history. [...]

That, by the way, is not unique to Trump. Midterm elections are almost always referendums on the president and his party. And they are almost always negative referendums. (Americans like divided government.) It's why the president's party has not lost House seats in only three midterms since the Civil War. (What years were those? 1934, 1998 and 2002.) [...]

The Ohio Democratic Senator cruised to a third term on Tuesday night against a credible opponent -- Rep. Jim Renacci (R) -- in a state that Trump won by eight points two years ago. That won't get all that much attention -- no one on either side thought Brown would lose -- but it should, as the party turns to 2020. Remember that Trump is President because of 80,000 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The Midwest is, literally, where he built his path to the White House -- and where he will look again in 2020. [...]

If you asked Democrats going into Tuesday night which governor race they wanted to win the most, they'd likely name Florida first and then Ohio. They won neither. And there's meaning well beyond simply losing at the gubernatorial level. Both are swing states -- maybe the two swingiest states -- going into the 2020 presidential election, and it's always better to have a governor's political machine working for you rather than against you in a swing state. And Republicans will have the upper hand in redistricting in 2021 in that trio of states -- which matters a whole hell of a lot.

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The Huffington Post: Trump Is Wreaking Havoc On Republican Governor Primaries

Trump hasn’t meddled in GOP Senate primaries, avoiding endorsements of controversial candidates and largely following McConnell’s lead. But it turns out Republicans were just worried about the wrong type of statewide race.

In recent weeks, Trump has turned GOP gubernatorial races into his own personal playground, endangering eight years of Republican dominance over the nation’s governor’s mansions. It culminated Tuesday night when Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer conceded to Trump-endorsed Secretary of State Kris Kobach and businessman Jeff Johnson defeated former Gov. Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota’s primary after hammering him over his criticisms of Trump in 2016.

Republicans control 33 of the nation’s governorships, a record. And the Republican Governors Association is a political heavyweight, regularly outraising its Democratic counterpart by a two-to-one margin. With Trump’s approval ratings in the low 40s and a high-energy Democratic base, Republicans were already expected to lose governorships in the fall, especially in blue-tinted states like Maine and New Mexico. Trump’s meddling in GOP primaries, along with Republican voters’ desire for candidates who ape Trump’s style, could expand those losses to swing states ― Florida and Minnesota ― and even into the red territory of Georgia and Kansas. [...]

It’s also possible Trump’s endorsement didn’t turn the tide in these contests. Most of the defeated candidates are the type of establishment politicians Republican voters have been tossing aside since the tea party movement began in 2010. In the secretly audiotaped words of Cagle, the Georgia primary came down to “who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck and who could be the craziest.”

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