Suburbs 2024

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020. 

Elena Schneider at Politico:

Kamala Harris is counting on suburban voters to do what they’ve done since Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016: reject him.

It may be the single most important piece of her electoral math. While Donald Trump has made inroads with Black and Latino men, polls in the late stage of the election show the suburbs could still power her to victory. The latest Wall Street Journal poll found Harris leading among suburban voters by 7 percentage points, while a Reuters/Ipsos analysis showed the vice president winning suburban households by 6 points.

Nicholas Fandos and Grace Ashford at NYT:

New York may not be a presidential swing state. But there is perhaps no more important battleground in this year’s race for the House of Representatives than the Empire State.

From the tip of Long Island to Syracuse, the two major parties are fighting over a half-dozen suburban swing districts — five held by Republicans — that helped decide the House majority in 2022 and are expected to again in November. While Democrats hold voter registration advantages in almost all of them, polls show that the Republicans’ focus on the southern border is resonating, along with other issues.

Divided, Indeed

 In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.    It is the "coalition of the ascendant" v. "the coalition of the resentful.

From Pew:

The rural - urban divide

The racial and educational divide:

The religious divide:

Urban and Rural

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.  

Philip Bump at WP:

Even as recently as 2000, four of the 10 most populous cities had Republican mayors. In recent years, that number has been zero.

That itself is a reflection of how the politics of place have shifted in the last two decades. Presidential election results show how urban areas have moved to the left — and rural areas much more sharply to the right. In 2000, large urban counties backed Democrat Al Gore by 18 points more than the national margin while rural counties backed George W. Bush by 15 points more. In 2020, that gap surged to 27 points in urban areas and 37 points in rural ones....

Why this shift? Well, consider another way of looking at the change in the leadership of America’s most populous cities: race and ethnicity.

A century ago, the mayors of America’s most populous cities were White men, uniformly. Slowly, that changed. Now, none of the leaders of the five most populous cities is a White man. In 2000, three still were.

...

In 2021, The Washington Post published research considering why the gap between urban and rural areas was growing so wide. The conclusion? Views of race.

“Racial attitudes among all Americans best explain the gap in vote choices between rural and urban areas,” the authors wrote. “[T]he different rates of racism denial among rural and urban Americans appears to explain about three-quarters of the urban-rural gap in voting for Trump.”

The God Gap

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.  

 Ryan Burge at Politico:

The overall sense that arises from the Religion Census is that the Democrats will continue to gain ground in suburban counties that are predominantly white and where religion is fading in size and importance. In so-called Blue Wall states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, Republicans will have a harder time winning over voters in suburban Milwaukee, Detroit, or Philadelphia with messaging about six-week abortion bans. On the other hand, the shifts in the religious landscape make it more likely that the GOP can hold off Democratic advances in important states like Texas and Florida. As more Hispanic immigrants come to those areas who are deeply religious and culturally conservative, Democratic messaging on social issues will not appeal to these types of votes.

It’s hard to overstate this point. In 1990, just seven percent of Americans were non-religious — 30 years later, the “nones” had quadrupled. And new data indicates that nearly half of Generation Z has no religious affiliation. In 2020, 46 percent of the votes cast for Biden came from non-religious voters. That could easily be half of his base in a bid for reelection. Both parties have been slow to react to this changing religious landscape. Where the remaining religious Americans live and vote is a crucial question for the electoral map in 2024 and beyond. Both parties are ignoring these changing dynamics at their own peril.

Wasserman on the Census and Redistricting

 Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.  The 2020 campaign unfolded amid a decennial census.

Full analysis of yesterday's Census results now up for @CookPolitical subscribers: why Democrats have a lot of reasons to like the new numbers. https://t.co/ZKzm0pLHEU pic.twitter.com/IkGvLrLaOS

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) August 13, 2021

At Cook Political, he explains:

First, the major Latino undercount many Democrats and minority advocacy groups feared didn't materialize, throwing cold water on theories about a Trump-induced chilling effect on census participation. Hispanic residents were 18.7 percent of the U.S. population in the 2020 Census, in line with pre-census estimates and up from 16.3 percent in the 2010 Census. Non-Hispanic whites fell from 64 percent to just 57.8 percent of the population.

That means Hispanic-heavy urban areas in states like California (where Hispanics just became the state's largest ethnic group) and Texas will get to keep slightly more political power that otherwise might have gone to whiter, more Republican areas.

Second, urban areas in general fared better than expected in today's population counts. New York City counted a massive seven percent more residents than pre-census estimates suggested, and Chicago's Cook County tallied three percent more. That should marginally help Democrats draw more favorable districts in Illinois and New York to offset expected GOP gerrymandering gains in Texas, Florida, Georgia and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, most rural counties (and 52 percent of all counties) reported population losses since 2010, and many reported even weaker numbers than expected. That could make it slightly more challenging for GOP mapmakers to dilute urban and suburban Democratic votes. In Texas, for example, it could make the strategic difference between Republicans settling for a 25-13 map versus attempting a 27-11 gerrymander.

If there's a concern for Democrats, it's that the higher-than-expected share of the population reporting more than one race - in part due to changes to the questionnaire design since 2010 - could make it more difficult to draw majority-minority districts containing a majority of one race. The Census's new differential privacy procedures, which add in noise to make the data more diffuse across tracts, only compound that challenge.

Although today's data brought Democrats good news, it only offsets a small fraction of the GOP's dominance over redistricting. Republicans still hold final redistricting authority in 20 states totaling 187 districts, while Democrats control eight states totaling 75 districts. Another ten states totaling 121 districts utilize independent commissions, while control is split between the parties in six states totaling 46 districts.

Partisan "Nonpartisan" Races in Orange County

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and local elections.

Brooke Staggs & Alicia Robinson at the OC Register

In theory, elections for dozens of city, county and regional posts are legally nonpartisan in Orange County, with ballots that don’t include party labels next to candidates’ names.

The reasoning is — or, rather, was — that local races are about local issues. Fixing potholes and keeping clean water flowing to your house are government functions that work best when they’re not subject to the kind of partisan haggling that comes with issues like gun control and abortion rights.

And voters used to go along with that. A generation ago, it would have been unheard of for a resident of, say, Irvine, to ask a council candidate knocking at the door about their party affiliation, said Randall Avila, spokesman for the Republican Party of Orange County.

No more. As Orange County’s demographics have changed, and as Democrats have grown in power in a county once dominated by Republicans, party politics and party affiliation are becoming increasingly big factors in local races.

...

Arguably, lingering “don’t ask, don’t tell” rules about party affiliation in local races might have helped Republicans in recent years. Even though registered Democrats have outnumbered registered Republicans in the county since 2019, the GOP has held its long-standing majorities in most local jurisdictions. Republicans now hold nearly 55% of county and local seats while Democrats hold just over 33%.

But with party labels increasingly attached to candidates in nonpartisan races, and with county voters leaning leftward, the GOP edge is slipping. Democrats are winning more seats on city councils, school boards, and library, sanitation and other special district boards,

“At the local level last year, we took 20 seats from Republicans,” said Ada Briceño, chair of the Democratic Party of Orange County. Those wins, she added, extended into traditionally GOP communities such as San Clemente and Fountain Valley.

Validated Voters, 2020

 In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.

At Pew, Ruth Igielnik, Scott Keeter, and Hannah Hartig discuss findings from a study of validated voters:

The 19% of 2020 voters who did not vote in 2016 or 2018 split roughly evenly between the two candidates (49% Biden vs. 47% Trump). However, as with voters overall, there was a substantial age divide within this group. Among those under age 30 who voted in 2020 but not in either of the two previous elections, Biden led 59% to 33%, while Trump won among new or irregular voters ages 30 and older by 55% to 42%. Younger voters also made up an outsize share of these voters: Those under age 30 made up 38% of new or irregular 2020 voters, though they represented just 15% of all 2020 voters....

Here are some of the other key findings from the analysis:

• Biden made gains with suburban voters. In 2020, Biden improved upon Clinton’s vote share with suburban voters: 45% supported Clinton in 2016 vs. 54% for Biden in 2020. This shift was also seen among White voters: Trump narrowly won White suburban voters by 4 points in 2020 (51%-47%); he carried this group by 16 points in 2016 (54%-38%). At the same time, Trump grew his vote share among rural voters. In 2016, Trump won 59% of rural voters, a number that rose to 65% in 2020.
• Trump made gains among Hispanic voters. Even as Biden held on to a majority of Hispanic voters in 2020, Trump made gains among this group overall. There was a wide educational divide among Hispanic voters: Trump did substantially better with those without a college degree than college-educated Hispanic voters (41% vs. 30%).
• Apart from the small shift among Hispanic voters, Joe Biden’s electoral coalition looked much like Hillary Clinton’s, with Black, Hispanic and Asian voters and those of other races casting about four-in-ten of his votes. Black voters remained overwhelmingly loyal to the Democratic Party, voting 92%-8% for Biden.
• Biden made gains with men, while Trump improved among women, narrowing the gender gap. The gender gap in the 2020 election was narrower than it had been in 2016, both because of gains that Biden made among men and because of gains Trump made among women. In 2020, men were almost evenly divided between Trump and Biden, unlike in 2016 when Trump won men by 11 points. Trump won a slightly larger share of women’s votes in 2020 than in 2016 (44% vs. 39%), while Biden’s share among women was nearly identical to Clinton’s (55% vs. 54%).
• Biden improved over Clinton among White non-college voters. White voters without a college degree were critical to Trump’s victory in 2016, when he won the group by 64% to 28%. In 2018, Democrats were able to gain some ground with these voters, earning 36% of the White, non-college vote to Republicans’ 61%. In 2020, Biden roughly maintained Democrats’ 2018 share among the group, improving upon Clinton’s 2016 performance by receiving the votes of 33%. But Trump’s share of the vote among this group – who represented 42% of the total electorate this year – was nearly identical to his vote share in 2016 (65%).
• Biden grew his support with some religious groups while Trump held his ground. Both Trump and Biden held onto or gained with large groups within their respective religious coalitions. Trump’s strong support among White evangelical Protestants ticked up (77% in 2016, 84% in 2020) while Biden got more support among atheists and agnostics than did Clinton in 2016.
• After decades of constituting the majority of voters, Baby Boomers and members of the Silent Generation made up less than half of the electorate in 2020 (44%), falling below the 52% they constituted in both 2016 and 2018. Gen Z and Millennial voters favored Biden over Trump by margins of about 20 points, while Gen Xers and Boomers were more evenly split in their preferences. Gen Z voters, those ages 23 and younger, constituted 8% of the electorate, while Millennials and Gen Xers made up 47% of 2020 voters.1
• A record number of voters reported casting ballots by mail in 2020 – including many voters who said it was their first time doing so. Nearly half of 2020 voters (46%) said they had voted by mail or absentee, and among that group, about four-in-ten said it was their first time casting a ballot this way. Hispanic and White voters were more likely than Black voters to have cast absentee or mail ballots, while Black voters were more likely than White or Hispanic voters to have voted early in person. Urban and suburban voters were also more likely than rural voters to have voted absentee or by mail ballot

.Ron Brownstein at The Atlantic:

The new Pew data, like the earlier 2020 assessments, underscore the durability of what I’ve called “the class inversion” in each party’s base. In the ANES studies, the longest-running of these sources, every Democratic presidential nominee from Adlai Stevenson through Jimmy Carter ran better among white voters without a college degree than among white voters with one. But as cultural issues supplant economic concerns as the principal dividing line between the parties, every Democratic nominee since Al Gore in 2000 has run better among white voters with a degree than among those without one.

The class inversion hit a new peak in 2016, with Hillary Clinton running at least 15 points better among college than noncollege white voters in most of the major data sources (including a breathtaking 27 points better in Pew’s assessment). In 2020, Catalist and the exit polls showed the gap widening, while Pew found it slightly narrowing, but the class inversion remained enormous in all three; each study also found Biden winning a majority of college-educated white voters. (Those gains were central to his strong showing in white-collar suburbs around major cities.) He was especially strong among college-educated white women: “We have the ability to make [them] a base group,” says Celinda Lake, who served as one of Biden’s lead campaign pollsters. But ominously for the GOP, all three sources also showed Biden gaining significantly over Clinton in 2016 among college-educated white men, who historically have been a much more reliable Republican constituency. And while white people without a college degree have been steadily shrinking as a share of the vote, these college-educated white people have slightly grown since 2004 (from about 28 percent to 31 percent of the electorate, per the census). Especially valuable for Democrats: They are highly reliable midterm voters.

 

“Only his gains among moderate to conservative voting groups allowed him to prevail."

Huh.https://t.co/szzM5SboNO

— Reed Galen (@reedgalen) July 1, 2021

GOP Metro Decline

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.  

At NYT, Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin discuss the GOP's urban decline.  Moderate Republicans such as Jerry Sanders and Kevin Faulconer served as mayor of San Diego.  The current mayor, Todd Gloria, is a Democrat.

 In off-year elections from Mr. Sanders’s California to New York City and New Jersey and the increasingly blue state of Virginia with its crucial suburbs of Washington, D.C., the Republican Party’s feeble appeal to the country’s big cities and dense suburbs is on vivid display.

Where the G.O.P. once consistently mounted robust campaigns in many of these areas, the party is now all but locked out of all the major contests of 2021.

The realignment of national politics around urban-versus-rural divisions has seemingly doomed Republicans in these areas as surely as it has all but eradicated the Democratic Party as a force across the Plains and the Upper Mountain West. At the national level, Republicans have largely accepted that trade-off as advantageous, since the structure of the federal government gives disproportionate power to sparsely populated rural states.

But the party’s growing irrelevance in urban and suburban areas also comes at a considerable cost, denying conservatives influence over the policies that govern much of the population and sidelining them in some of the country’s centers of innovation and economic might. The trend has helped turn formerly red states, like Georgia and Arizona, into purple battlegrounds as their largest cities and suburbs have grown larger and more ethnically mixed.

At Politico, Zack Stanton writes of Oakland County, Michigan, where Mitt Romney grew up.

“Oakland County was kind of the quintessential suburban Republican stronghold over the postwar period,” says Jeff Timmer, a longtime GOP strategist who was executive director of the state party from 2005-2009. It was (and is) a huge source of campaign donations for the party and its candidates. It had massive influence in Lansing, and an influential bipartisan delegation in Washington. It was a must-visit locale for every aspiring Republican presidential candidate.

“When I ran the Michigan Republican Party, we always pointed to Oakland: ‘These guys have got their shit together,’” says Timmer.

To put it bluntly, the shit is no longer together.

Ten years ago, Republicans held two of the four GOP-drawn U.S. House seats in Oakland (the other two were safe Democratic); now, all four are in Democratic hands. Democratic women now represent the Romney family’s hometown in the state House, state Senate and U.S. House (Rep. Haley Stevens). Ten years ago, Brooks Patterson, the silver-tongued sun-God around whom all local politics orbited, was county executive, and Republicans held four of the six countywide elected posts; Democrats now hold five of them, including the executive. After GOP-controlled redistricting in 2012, Republicans had a 14-7 majority on the Oakland County Board of Commissioners; now, Democrats have an 11-10 edge and will control the county-level redistricting process for the first time in a half-century.

Instagram Socialism as a Problem for Democrats

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race.   Our next book, title TBA, discusses the 2020 results.

Some Democrats think that the controversy over "defunding" the police -- and other aspects of big-city progressivism -- cost their party seats in the 2020 congressional elections

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic:

One analysis of Census Bureau data projected that by 2040, roughly half of the population will be represented by 16 senators; the other, more rural half will have 84 senators at their disposal. If Democrats don’t find a way to broaden their coalition into less populous states with smaller metro areas, it may be impossible to pass liberal laws for the next generation.

Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times published an analysis of California ballot measures that found that “the state’s two major population centers have grown more and more different” from the rest of the state. Residents of Los Angeles and the Bay Area were at least 30 percentage points more likely than other Californians to support various propositions, such as reinstating affirmative action and allowing parolees to vote. A 30-point gap is massive—akin to the difference between deep-blue Massachusetts and purple Pennsylvania. From a political perspective, Los Angeles and the Bay Area look like leftist havens in an otherwise moderate state.

Many of their causes are virtuous, such as universal health care and higher pay for low-income service workers. But given the dynamics of online communication, which prizes extremity, Instagram socialism usually functions as a crowd-sourcing exercise to brand widely appealing ideas in their most emotional and viral—and, therefore, most radical—fashion. Thus, major police reform (a popular idea) is branded “Abolish the Police” (an unpopular idea); a welcoming disposition toward immigrants (a popular idea) is blurred with calls for open borders (an unpopular idea); and universal health care (a popular idea) is folded into socialism (an unpopular idea).

“Defund police, open borders, socialism—it’s killing us,” said Representative Vicente Gonzalez, a Democrat from South Texas who nearly lost a district this year he’d previously won by 20 points. Beyond giving Republicans and Fox News easy ways to tarnish otherwise appealing reforms, Instagram socialism’s sloganeering is a turnoff for moderates who spend time online but are not, in the modern capital-O sense, Online. The average voter in a general election is something like a moderate 50-year-old woman without a four-year college degree who stays away from partisan media and follows politics only occasionally. She might hate Trump, but her dispositional conservatism makes her less likely to embrace policies tweaked in a social-media lab for viral emotionality.

Democrats' Downballot Blues

 In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race.   Our next book, title TBA, discusses the 2020 results.

Trip Gabriel at NYT:

Across the country, suburban voters’ disgust with Mr. Trump — the key to Mr. Biden’s election — did not translate into a wide rebuke of other Republicans, as Democrats had expected after the party made significant gains in suburban areas in the 2018 midterm elections. From the top of the party down to the state level, Democratic officials are awakening to the reality that voters may have delivered a one-time verdict on Mr. Trump that does not equal ongoing support for center-left policies.

Emily Skopov was the Democratic nominee for an open state legislative seat in a Pittsburgh suburb. She lost.

“There’s a significant difference between a referendum on a clown show, which is what we had at the top of the ticket, and embracing the values of the Democratic ticket,” said Nichole Remmert, Ms. Skopov’s campaign manager. “People bought into Joe Biden to stop the insanity in the White House. They did not suddenly become Democrats.”

...

This year, Democrats targeted a dozen state legislative chambers where Republicans held tenuous majorities, including in Pennsylvania, Texas, Arizona, North Carolina and Minnesota. Their goal was to check the power of Republicans to redraw congressional and legislative districts in 2021, and to curb the rightward drift of policies from abortion to gun safety to voting rights.

But in all cases, Democrats came up short. None of their targeted legislative chambers flipped, even though Mr. Biden carried many of the districts that down-ballot Democrats did not. It could make it harder for Democrats to retain a House majority in 2022.

“In 2018 in the Philadelphia suburbs, you had rage voting against Trump,” said Senator Bob Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania, a Democrat. But this year, with Mr. Trump on the ballot, the president brought out many more supporters who are occasional voters, diluting what Democrats had widely anticipated would be another wave election for them. “It may be suburban voters are still ticket splitters,” Mr. Casey said.

...

Ms. Skopov, the losing candidate in suburban Pittsburgh, was quick to tell voters while knocking on doors before the election: “I’m a fan of our police. I’m not looking to defund police.”

Still, she was hammered in mailings by Republicans who portrayed her as having an anti-law-enforcement position, which her campaign manager, Ms. Remmert, said did great damage.

Ms. Remmert cautioned that if Democrats hoped to cement their 2020 suburban gains in a presidential race in which Republicans put up someone less divisive than Mr. Trump, they would need to recalibrate their messaging.

“A lot of the suburban districts that you’re trying to flip, you can’t win by just turning out your base,” she said. “We could get every Democratic vote in those districts and you’re still not going to win. You have to be able to turn out independents and Republican voters for your message.”

 

Texas

 In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race. 

Texas, once part of the GOP base, is competitive this year.  Candace Valenzuela will probably succeed a Republican in representing a Dallas-area House seat.

Dan Balz at WP:

The story of the political change in Texas begins with the enormous population growth the state has experienced over the past decade, with most of it concentrated in the major metropolitan areas of Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin.

Between 2010 and 2018, the 27 counties that comprise these major metropolitan areas collectively added nearly 3 million people — an increase of 19 percent — and today they make up one of the most vibrant economic areas in the entire country. Republican elected officials have bragged about the state’s ability to attract new businesses, but the added growth has helped to change the political balance in the state.

One change is the increased dominance of the big cities and suburbs in overall turnout. According to data compiled by Richard Murray and Renee Cross of the University of Houston, the 27 counties that make up the major metropolitan areas account for 69 percent of the statewide vote, compared with 60 percent in 1996 and 52 percent in 1968.

For a long time, the balance between metro and non-metro Texas didn’t make much difference. The metropolitan areas split their votes between Republicans and Democrats in about the same proportions as in the smaller towns and rural areas, according to Murray and Cross. That began to change in the past two decades and has quickened in the past five years. Not only do the big cities and surrounding suburbs account for a larger proportion of the statewide vote, they are increasingly voting Democratic.

Changing demographics are a major factor as well, as Texas becomes increasingly diverse. For years, Democrats have pointed to the growth in the Latino community as the pathway to turning Texas blue — the demographics-as-destiny argument. With birthrates in the Anglo community having slowed, the Latino population is on pace to equal or surpass the non-Hispanic White population by 2022.

Before Trump came on the scene, some Texas Republicans had made more significant inroads among Hispanic voters than, say, Republicans in California. Former president George W. Bush focused on Latinos and was rewarded in both his gubernatorial and presidential races. Other Republican elected officials are still able to attract good levels of Latino support.

The success of Republicans like Bush and others frustrated the predictions of Democrats of a more rapid red-to-blue shift in the state, as the party’s disappointing showing in gubernatorial and Senate races over the years has shown. But Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has made it more difficult for Republicans to maintain, let alone expand, their Latino support.

Beyond the growth in the Latino population, another demographic change that is affecting the political balance is the rise of Asian Americans: Vietnamese, Indians, Chinese and others. Asian Americans are now the fastest-growing segment of the Texas population, and they are voting for Democrats more than they once did.

The Bluing of the Sunbelt

 In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race. 

Arizona and Texas, once part of the GOP base, are competitive this year.

At Politico, Sabrina Rodriguez reports on Arizona:

Arizona’s state races haven’t gotten so much attention given the millions of dollars being pumped into the presidential matchup and expensive race between appointed Republican Sen. Martha McSally and Kelly, which could help tip the Senate over to Democrats. But it’s the possibility of flipping that state legislature that has many Republicans thinking about the long-term effects of Trump’s GOP.

“The Republican Party needs to understand that there’s a large number of us voting Democrat all down the ballot because of Trump, and they need to realize that their choice to blindly follow him will impact the state politics,” said Daniel Barker, a former Arizona Court of Appeals Judge who started Arizona Republicans Who Believe In Treating Others With Respect, a PAC that’s supporting Biden.

“We need to change direction,” he added.

The November election will provide the first indication of whether Arizona is becoming Democratic-leaning territory, like Colorado and Virginia — or a perennial swing state, like Florida. The state’s growing Latino population and shifting attitudes among college-educated white voters across the state have been a boon to Democrats. Almost a third of the state is Latino — and while only about half of them are expected to vote, they are likely to break heavily for Democrats: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema secured 70 percent Latino support in her 2018 run.

Matt Levin at CalMatters:

“Where things look really different in Texas politics right now are in these districts that have seen rapid population growth, and Californians have been a part of that growth,” said Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.
...

While the prospect of Texas as a swing state may shock those who associate the state with George W. Bush, it shouldn’t surprise anyone paying attention to its politics over the last decade. While Barack Obama lost Texas by 16 points in his 2012 re-election bid, in 2016 Hillary Clinton closed that gap to single-digits. Two years later, Democrat Beto O’Rourke lost to incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz by less than three points.

The improving performance of Texas Democrats tracks well with the exodus of Californians into Sun Belt states over the past two decades. Since 2008, more than 700,000 Californians have moved to Texas, at first propelled by the Great Recession and later by their home state’s increasingly untenable cost of living. ...

Henson warns it’s seductively reductionist to attribute Texas’ rapid statewide purpling simply to California expats. When you factor in the number of Texans that have moved to California over the last decade, the net political effect on a state with 29 million people is less progressive tidal wave and more trickling blue-ish tributary. With a rising Latino population and growing metropolitan areas, Texas’ internal demographic shifts have combined with out-of-state immigration (not just from California) to alter its politics.

It’s also a mistake to think everyone from California moving to Texas drove there in a Prius adorned with a “Billionaires can’t buy Bernie” bumper sticker. While precise polling on ex-Californians’ political persuasions is hard to find, loads of anecdotal evidence suggest a decent chunk of Golden State emigres are fleeing the state precisely because of its progressive culture.

But the parts of Texas where Californians are most likely to move — the sprawling suburbs of Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth — are now politically competitive in a way that was unfathomable 20 years ago. Even if progressive Californians aren’t numerous enough to push Texas away from Trump, they can still tilt congressional and state legislative races. In many places, they already have.

“Those areas, particularly the suburban and exurban areas outside of Texas metros, have become ground zero for a much more competitive Texas in which the Republican hegemony that has been so uniform here for the last twenty years has come under siege,” said Henson.

 Patrick Svitek at The Texas Tribune:

All but one of the 10 Democrats running to flip nationally targeted U.S. House seats in Texas raised more than their Republican opponents over the past three months, according to the latest campaign finance reports.

In six of those nine races, the Republican ended the quarter with more cash on hand, a financial advantage heading into the last full month before Election Day. But the Democratic fundraising shows serious momentum as the national party reaches the finale of its drive to make Texas the top congressional battleground nationwide this November.

Republicans also had a bright spot in one of the two seats they are trying to win back, that of Democratic Rep. Lizzie Pannill Fletcher of Houston. Her GOP challenger, Wesley Hunt, soundly outraised her. She ended the quarter with a small cash-on-hand advantage.

Suburban Blues

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race. The update -- recently published -- looks at political and demographic trends through the 2018 midterm.  Suburbs are an important part of the story.

At CalMatters, Ben Christopher writes of the suburban collapse of the California GOP.

Your average suburban voter has clearly soured on President Trump. But the definition of “average suburban voter” has changed over the last two decades, as the suburbs swelled. Much of that population growth has been driven by immigrants and lower-income migrants from nearby cities.

The electoral flipping of the suburbs has been particularly dramatic in Southern California’s inland regions.

The most dramatic example: California’s 60th Assembly district, centered around the City of Corona in the western Inland Empire. When Republican Eric Linder won the seat six years ago by 23 percentage points, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 5 points.

But in 2016, the district swung. Democrats now topped Republicans — and voters replaced Linder with the current Democratic Assemblymember Sabrina Cervantes. At last count, district Democrats hold at 11 percentage point lead over Republicans.

The trend away from the GOP may have been supercharged by the state’s housing crunch as younger people, renters, Black and brown Californians — in other words, the Democratic Party’s base — have fled inland seeking cheaper shelter.

Thomas Beaumont and Julia Carr Smyth at AP:

Republican lawmakers and strategists in Ohio say they are seeing research that shows a near-uniform drop in support from his 2016 totals across every suburban region of the state.

They say that Trump, who won Ohio by 8 percentage points in 2016, maintains a yawning advantage in more rural areas and small towns. Still, Republicans are concerned that if he is losing badly in suburban areas in Ohio, it is a signal that Trump’s hold on other states in the industrial heartland that delivered him the presidency may be in peril.

“The million-dollar question becomes, how does that translate in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania?” said Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist who managed Ohio Sen. Rob Portman’s 2016 reelection campaign. “It translates into probably not a very good night.”

Ohio has long been a bellwether. No Republican has won the White House without carrying the state since the advent of the modern two-party system, and no Democrat has since 1960.

Trump is faring worse than four years ago in communities in essentially all suburban areas around Ohio, from its major cities to its several mid-size metro areas, more than a half-dozen Republican operatives tracking races across Ohio say.

Trump has slipped in suburbs to the east and west of Cleveland, where he narrowly edged Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016, they say. In the blue-collar suburbs of Youngstown, where Trump won by double digits, the same appears to be true.

In affluent suburbs, such as Dublin northwest of Columbus, 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney won by almost 20 percentage points. Four years later, Trump narrowly lost to Clinton. Less than two months before the 2020 election, Republicans were concerned about signs the trend in Dublin has continued, according to several GOP operatives following legislative and congressional races.

 

 

Trump's Permission Structure

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well underway. 

Mike Allen and Alayna Treene at Axios:

The four-night Republican convention had twin aims, officials tell Axios:

1. Make Trump more palatable to suburbanites who hate his rhetoric but like some of his policies.
2. Ratchet up the fear factor for the Biden-Harris ticket, mostly using riots and safety as hot buttons — "deadly sanctuary cities," and charges Biden would let in jihadis, take down the wall and turn criminals loose.

Parts of the convention were effective — including stories of personal empathy, and testimonies from Black allies like Herschel Walker, the former NFL star, who said: "I take it as a personal insult that people would think I've had a 37-year friendship with a racist."

The bottom line: All those moments were designed to create a permission structure for nervous suburbanites to vote for Trump despite possible stigma in their social circles, a Trump aide told Axios.

• But Trump advisers admit there was there was lots of contradictory messaging, such as hitting the Biden-backed 1994 crime bill as too harsh, while crowning Trump the candidate of law and order.
• And harping on rising violence in big cities, when Trump is in charge.

Yes, the permission ramp was quite rickety.

Damon Linker at The Week:

Donald Trump is far behind with female voters. Given that fact, one would expect the Trump campaign to make some moves to appeal to women. Yet on Tuesday night, anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson addressed the RNC and its audience of millions, despite her holding views that go far beyond garden-variety opposition to abortion.

Earlier in the day on Tuesday, Johnson faced a firestorm of criticism for saying in a YouTube video earlier this year that her "brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons." Then, shortly before the RNC began, a White House reporter for CBS News drew attention to two of Johnson’s tweets from May in which she expressed support for "bringing back household voting," which would give each household a single vote — and give husbands "the final say." (Johnson doubled down on this outlandishly retrograde position on Tuesday evening just a few hours before her speech.)

No wonder, then, that when she stood at the podium at the Mellon Auditorium in Washington D.C., Johnson unleashed an unmodulated attack on her former employer Planned Parenthood, denouncing its "racist roots," deploring its "barbarity," and even pausing to evoke "what abortion smells like." The assault naturally culminated in gushing praise for the anti-abortion efforts of President Trump.

The Battle for the Hill, Early August

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race. 

James Arkin at Politico:

On Thursday, the top operative for Senate Republicans' campaign arm appeared on a private Zoom call organized by GOP operatives to discuss the party's efforts to stave off a Democratic takeover.

During the presentation, National Republican Senatorial Committee executive director Kevin McLaughlin warned that if hardline conservative Kris Kobach wins next Tuesday's Kansas Senate primary, it could doom the GOP Senate majority — and perhaps even hurt President Donald Trump in a state that hasn't voted Democratic since 1964.

“The Senate majority runs through Kansas,” McLaughlin warned, according to people familiar with the call.

The new warning came after a flurry of Democratic meddling has scrambled the closing weeks of a primary race that had otherwise gotten back on track. Senate Republicans have opposed Kobach for a year, fretting that he can’t win a Senate contest after losing the 2018 gubernatorial race, and have warned about him consistently in public and in private.

 Emily Cochrane and Catie Edmondson at NYT:

Suburban districts like these have long been critical bases of Republican support, packed with affluent white voters who reliably chose Republicans to represent them in Congress. Democrats seized control of the House in 2018 by making inroads in communities like these, and Republicans have tied their hopes of reclaiming power to preserving their remaining footholds there. But as Mr. Trump continues to stumble in his response to the pandemic and seeks to stir up racist fears with pledges to preserve the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream,” such districts are slipping further from the party’s grasp, and threatening to drag down congressional Republicans in November’s elections.

Interviews with more than two dozen party officials, strategists and voters in areas like these help explain what recent polls have found: that Mr. Trump’s strategy is alienating independent and even some conservative voters — particularly women and better-educated Americans — who are turned off by his partisan appeals and disappointed in his leadership. From the suburbs of St. Louis to Omaha to Houston, they expressed deep concern about Mr. Trump’s approach to twin national crises, lamenting his confident declarations that the coronavirus was under control and his move to stoke racial divides after nationwide protests over police brutality against Black Americans.

One result is that House Republicans, who began the election cycle hoping to win an uphill battle to recapture their majority — or at the very least, claw back some of the competitive districts they lost to Democrats in 2018 — are instead scrambling to shore up seats that once would have required little effort to hold. Analysts at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report recently forecast that November could bring “a Democratic tsunami,” and placed once safe Republican incumbents on an “anti-Trump wave watch list.”

Amy Walter at Cook Political Report:

But this is 2020. We are constantly battling 2016 political PTSD ("what if the polls are wrong?"). Trump also has an uncanny ability to survive political challenges that would sink traditional politicians.

We also live in a time of deep and sustained partisanship. In 2018, despite losing the national vote by almost eight points, Republicans were able to (narrowly) hold onto statewide races in Texas, Georgia, Florida and Ohio. And, of course, this partisanship and division is nurtured and exploited by technology like social media. As such, we don't just live in different bubbles; we live in different realities. It's not just that Democrats and Republicans disagree on how well Trump is handling this crisis; they disagree on whether we are currently in a crisis. For example, according to a July Pew Opinion Research poll, just under half (46 percent) of Republicans view coronavirus as a major threat to the health of the public, compared to 67 percent of independents and 85 percent of Democrats.

The once rock-solid grip that the president had on his party seems to be slipping. Talking with pollsters and strategists from both sides this week, it's clear that Trump is suffering not just with Democrats and independents but also with GOP voters. They tell us of polling that shows Trump underwater in districts he carried easily in 2016. One GOP strategist told me that even in heavily Republican districts, Trump's job approval rating among Republicans has dropped 10-20 points. The KFF poll released last week found Trump's overall job approval rating among Republicans dropped 12 points between May and July. On handling coronavirus, the drop in GOP support was an even more dramatic 26 points.

Louisiana and Blue Suburbs

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race. The update -- recently published -- looks at political and demographic trends through the 2018 midterm.  Last night, Democrat John Bel Edwards won reelection as governor of Louisiana.

If anyone still doubts southern suburbs are getting bluer, Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) just carried a set of NOLA suburbs where Obama got *26%* of the vote in 2008. https://t.co/nuaVMYnKAZ

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 17, 2019

Before the results came in, Jonathan Martin wrote at NYT:

[The] traditional regional divide is giving way to an urban versus rural political chasm that is shaping elections across the country. Republicans are dominating the countryside across much of the state, while Democrats are running up large margins in the cities in both the north and south while gaining strength in the suburbs.
...
Remarkably, his strong showing [in last month's first-round vote] included Jefferson Parish, which is the largest locality in suburban New Orleans and was where modern Republicanism first took root in the state. But with an influx of Hispanic, Vietnamese-American and African-American voters, and with the drift of college-educated whites away from the Trump-era G.O.P., the parish has become more friendly to Democrats.

“These suburbs used to be reliably Republican,” said former Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat. “But now you’ve got some moderate Republican women who find what’s going on in the White House appalling.”

Mr. Edwards received 53 percent of the vote in Jefferson Parish in the October primary. In 2003, when Bobby Jindal, a Republican, was making his first bid for governor, he captured nearly 63 percent of the vote there even as he lost statewide.

Even as recently as 2008, when John McCain was being routed nationally, he still managed to capture 65 percent of the vote in Jefferson Parish. But by 2016, Mr. Trump was winning only 55 percent there as he easily carried the state.

“McCain was the kind of Republican who could put together the crazies and country clubbers,” observed Roy Fletcher, a longtime political strategist here.

Yesterday, Edwards got 57 percent in Jefferson Parish and about 90 percent in Orleans Parish (New Orleans). 

Virginia Blue

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race. The update -- recently published -- looks at political and demographic trends through the 2018 midterm.

In 2000, the GOP had unified control of Virginia government.  As of the 2019 elections, the Democrats do.

 Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff at NYT:

Once the heart of the confederacy, Virginia is now the land of Indian grocery stores, Korean churches and Diwali festivals. The state population has boomed — up by 38 percent since 1990, with the biggest growth in densely settled suburban areas like South Riding. One in 10 people eligible to vote in the state were born outside the United States, up from one in 28 in 1990. It is also significantly less white. In 1990, the census tracts that make up Mr. Katkuri’s Senate district were home to about 35,000 people — 91 percent of them white. Today, its population of 225,000 is just 64 percent white.
...
It’s not just Virginia. From Atlanta to Houston, this pattern is repeating itself — a new kind of suburbanization that is sweeping through politics. The densely populated inner ring suburbs are turning blue, while the mostly white exurban outer ring is redder than ever. Elections are won and lost along that suburban line, and in some places — like Atlanta, Denver, and Riverside County, Calif. — Democrats have begun to breach Republicans’ firewalls.

...

Around the advent of the modern immigration system, in 1965, foreign-born people made up only about five percent of the American population. Now they are nearly 14 percent, almost as high as the last peak in the early 20th century. The concentrations used to be in larger gateway cities, but immigrants have spread out considerably since then.

Some went South. In 1980, 56 percent of adults eligible to vote in Virginia were born in the state. Today, that’s down to 45 percent.

Lakshmi Sridaran, who heads South Asian Americans Leading Together, said that about a third of South Asians in the United States now live in the South. The South Asian population in the South nearly tripled from 2000 to 2017, to 1.4 million.

Of the 10 metro areas that had the largest South Asian growth, five are in the South, said Ms. Sridaran, who was born in Atlanta, after her father took a teaching job at Morehouse School of Medicine in the early 1980s.

 

Off-Year Blues

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race. The update -- recently published -- looks at political and demographic trends through the 2018 midterm.

Catherine Lucey at WSJ:

President Trump tried an 11th-hour rally, a battery of tweets and a personal plea for help. But, as he acknowledged in a tweet late Tuesday, his efforts didn’t appear to be enough to get a Republican running for governor in Kentucky over the finish line late Tuesday, suggesting some limitations to his political pull at a key moment for his presidency.

Just three years after Mr. Trump won the state with wide margins, Democrat Andy Beshear declared victory over incumbent Republican Gov. Matt Bevin Tuesday night, though Mr. Bevin didn’t immediately concede and the Associated Press has yet to call a winner. Republicans prevailed in other statewide races in Kentucky and won the governor’s race in Mississippi, another red state where Mr. Trump campaigned, but suffered losses in Virginia, where Democrats seized control of the statehouse.

Patrick Wilson at The Richmond Times-Dispatach:

Fueled by President Donald Trump’s unpopularity, Virginia voters on Tuesday handed control of the state’s General Assembly to Democrats, setting up the most progressive legislature in modern times.

Democrats have not held both the state House and Senate and the governor’s mansion in 26 years, and Tuesday’s results give them power to pass an agenda and allow Gov. Ralph Northam to sign his party’s bills into law.

Democrats celebrated across the state Tuesday night. Their momentum began two years ago when Democrats flipped 15 seats in the House of Delegates. They outraised Republicans this year to finish the job, doing well in Northern Virginia and the Richmond suburbs. Results were mixed in Virginia Beach, where Republicans held some key seats.

At Roll Call, Nathan Gonzales says that Trump probably helped Bevin more than he hurt him, but...

Suburbs continue to be a problem for Republicans. Tuesday’s results continued to demonstrate GOP problems in the suburbs since Trump took office. The latest was in northern Kentucky in the Cincinnati suburbs, where Bevin won in 2015 and Beshear won in 2019. Or in northern Mississippi, in the Memphis suburbs where the GOP margin in DeSoto County dropped from 61 points to 20 points, according to Ryan Matsumoto, a contributing analyst to Inside Elections. These are just the latest pieces of evidence after Democrat Dan McCready’s overperformance in the Charlotte suburbs from 2018 to the 2019 special election in North Carolina’s 9th District. It should be particularly concerning for President Trump in his efforts to win Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, and Texas in 2020.