Donald Trump
President Donald Trump’s damage in the suburbs
has come primarily, as it has elsewhere, from his handling of the coronavirus
pandemic. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
Donald Trump's suburban horror show
If current numbers hold, the Republican Party will
suffer its worst defeat in the suburbs in decades — with implications reaching
far beyond November.
By DAVID
SIDERS
07/24/2020
06:58 PM EDT
Donald
Trump says Joe Biden wants to abolish the suburbs. But polls show a different
truth: The suburbs want to abolish Donald Trump.
If current
numbers hold, the Republican Party will suffer its worst defeat in the suburbs
in decades — with implications reaching far beyond November.
It was in
the suburbs two years ago that Democrats built their House majority, ripping
through Republican-held territory across the country, from Minnesota and Texas
to Georgia, Virginia and Illinois.
It would be
bad enough for the GOP if that had been a temporary setback. But with the
prospect of a second straight collapse in the suburbs this year, it is
beginning to look like a wholesale retreat.
“We can’t
give up more ground in the suburbs nationally without having a real problem for
our party,” said Charles Hellwig, a former chair of the Republican Party in
Wake County, N.C., describing a landscape in which “every year, every month,
every day, we get a little bluer.”
It is the
same story in suburbs everywhere. In a Fox News poll last weekend, Trump was
trailing Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, by 11 percentage points
in the suburbs. An ABC News/Washington Post poll had Trump down 9 percentage
points there — larger margins in the suburbs than exit polls have recorded
since the 1980s, when Republicans were winning there by double digits.
That
polling reflects a dramatic swing from 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in
the suburbs by 4 percentage points. Trump’s erosion in the suburbs is a major
reason the electoral map this year has expanded for Democrats in recent weeks —
with Trump in danger not only of losing, but of taking the Senate down with
him. And demographic shifts are only becoming more favorable to Democrats. The
suburbs are rapidly growing, and by 2018, according to Pew, people of color
made up nearly a third of suburban population.
“The
movement of suburban voters, particularly educated women and millennials being
so progressive in their politics, increased voting participating among Latinos,
African Americans,” said Bill Carrick, a Democratic strategist who managed
Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt’s 1988 presidential campaign. “That all contributes
to this geography: Suddenly, we’ve got Georgia and Texas and Florida and Arizona,
Iowa. There’s a lot of places in play.”
Trump’s
damage in the suburbs has come primarily, as it has elsewhere, from his
handling of the coronavirus pandemic. But Trump’s response to the George Floyd
protests also appears to have hurt him in the suburbs — his militant reaction
crashing into an electorate that is less white and insular than it was half a
century ago, when Richard Nixon made “law and order” rhetoric work.
Trump's
intervention in Portland, Ore., has drawn more people into the streets, not
fewer — including clashes between not only the Trump administration and antifa,
but a “wall of moms.”
Comparing
new voter registration in 17 states from immediately before the Floyd protests
began to the week after, the Democratic data firm TargetSmart found that young
people and people of color were registering at higher rates than before — with
years to cast ballots 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 about 23 percent the previous week, said Tom Bonier,
TargetSmart's CEO. He saw similar trends in North Carolina, and even in heavily
Republican states like Missouri and Oklahoma.
“Literally
every state you’re seeing these increases, which is not something we saw in
2018,” Bonier said. “It’s interesting to see how the demonstrations in cities
around the country are playing. … Suburban voters seem to be more sympathetic
to those demonstrations than they ever have been in the past.”
When
Americans were asked in the ABC News/Washington Post poll who they trusted more
to handle issues surrounding crime and safety, they preferred Biden to Trump 50
percent to 41 percent.
Ed Bruley,
chair of the Democratic Party in Michigan's working-class suburbs of Macomb
County, said even compared with four or five years ago, voters in his county
have become more sensitive to issues of racial justice, in large part because
of the proliferation of video, such as Floyd’s death.
“With the
videos nowadays,” he said, “everyone can now have an emotional experience about
this. It’s no longer academic.”
Former
Republican Rep. Ryan Costello, who represented the Philadelphia suburbs, said
in the Floyd protests, “There was an opportunity in the riots and defund
police-type stuff."
However, he
said, "I just think these things happen so fast that ultimately Trump
becomes the story again.” The president would have fared better, he said, if
the focus had remained on “what the left is doing,” not Trump, who he said “has
deteriorated in the suburbs.”
Tim
Murtaugh, a spokesman for Trump's reelection effort, said polls that show Trump
struggling in the suburbs oversample Democrats or undersample Republicans — and
that in the campaign’s own polling, Trump “remains strong” in a race in which
the Trump campaign is only beginning to define Biden.
Several
Republican Party officials said in recent days that they suspect Murtaugh is right.
In North Carolina, Hellwig said he expects Trump’s public safety appeals will
ultimately resonate with suburban voters, inviting them to associate Democrats
with “the worst things that are happening across the country in terms of the
violence and the protests becoming riots.”
There are
still more than 100 days before the election, and Trump’s overtures to the
suburbs are becoming more explicit.
Last week
on the South Lawn, chastising Democrats for their positions on issues ranging
from law enforcement to climate change and urban planning, Trump accused
Democrats of plotting to “abolish our beautiful and successful suburbs.” He is
running advertisements suggesting a Biden presidency would invite a rise in
crime. On Wednesday, he announced plans to send federal law enforcement agents
to Chicago and Albuquerque, N.M. And in another nod to the suburbs, the White
House planned Thursday to weaken Obama-era fair housing rules.
Sharing an
article on Twitter criticizing such policies, Trump wrote, "The Suburban
Housewives of America must read this article. Biden will destroy your
neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even
better!"
Mike
Erlandson, a former chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said
he worried in late May, when the protests following Floyd’s death in
Minneapolis first erupted, that a law-and-order campaign could be persuasive in
some swing, suburban districts. He had just seen a man spray-paint “F--k the
white people from the suburbs” on a wall in Minneapolis.
But as the
protests — and Trump’s response — have unfolded, he has seen Trump hurt his own
standing there.
“The fact
that the president is trying to drive a wedge in on things around law
enforcement, I think most people find disappointing,” Erlandson said.
The
suburbs, he said, "certainly have not turned their back on law
enforcement." But at the same time, he said, "they don’t really see
leadership coming out of the White House.”
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