A new profile by CNN’s Ron Brownstein details how Democrats are driving deep into the suburbs, emboldened by significant gains among college-educated white voters and communities of color who are rejecting Washington Republicans’ recklessness that is dragging GOP candidates down across the battlefield.
In the article, current polling shows the GOP losing ground with these two key voting blocs that are increasingly turning away from Republicans’ more and more reckless and alienating message that is causing their numbers to sink to record lows in key communities that delivered a House Democratic Majority in 2018.
CNN: Trump could sink the House GOP in suburbia
By Ron Brownstein
July 7, 2020
KEY POINTS:
- President Donald Trump’s continuing erosion among well-educated voters looms as perhaps the most imposing headwind to Republican hopes of recapturing the House of Representatives in November — or even avoiding further losses in the chamber.
- The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee built on that beachhead by investing early in serious challenges in a number of Republican-held House districts, most of them better educated than average. The party’s best Texas pickup opportunity is the heavily minority but relatively less-college-educated West Texas seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Will Hurd.
- Now, recent national and district-level polls signal that many of the well-educated voters souring on Trump are also displaying more resistance to Republican congressional candidates than in 2018 — potentially much more.
- “You can’t afford that,” says [former NRCC Chair Tom] Davis, now a partner in Holland & Knight, a DC law firm. “[Suburbia] was the base of the Republican Party just a decade and a half ago. And there just aren’t enough rural voters to make up for those kind of losses. It means for the Republicans that instead of picking up seats in the House, that the bleeding could continue.”
- Public polling this spring consistently showed Trump and the GOP facing grim numbers with well-educated voters. National surveys released in the past few weeks by Monmouth University, the Pew Research Center and CNN all showed Trump’s approval rating among White voters with at least a four-year college education sinking to 33% or less, with at least 64% disapproving.
- That decline contrasted with Trump’s showing among minorities in the new CNN and Monmouth polls, which found the President’s approval rating with voters of color was almost exactly the same as in the 2018 exit poll, just over 1-in-4 in each case.
- Critically, some of the recent public surveys found that weakness trickling down to GOP congressional candidates. In last week’s Monmouth survey, college-educated White voters preferred Democrats over Republicans in House races by a resounding 59% to 36%.
- In all, Democrats control 135 of the House districts with higher-than-average college education levels, while Republicans hold just 41.
- Many of the top Democratic House targets for November are within those remaining 41 Republican districts with more college graduates than average.
- The flip side is also true: Many of the Democrats elected in 2018 who Republicans most hope to oust hold seats in districts with many more college graduates than average
- After that the Democrats’ top targets are all districts that combine substantial racial diversity with large numbers of college graduates, including open seats in the suburbs of Dallas and Houston and challenges to GOP incumbent Reps. Chip Roy and, somewhat more distantly, Michael McCaul in districts that sprawl south from Austin through more conservative rural communities.
- [Sri] Kulkarni’s race captures another critical element of the battle for these white-collar districts. Many of them are in metropolitan areas at the epicenter of this year’s twin national earthquakes: the coronavirus outbreak and the eruption of protests that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Floyd’s funeral was held just across the border in Harris County, which has emerged as one of the centers of the outbreak, with a surging caseload (more than 36,000 as of Monday) that officials warn may soon overwhelm its hospital system.
- Still, Mackowiak acknowledges that if 2020 produces an electoral divide in Texas similar to the one in the 2018 Senate race — with Trump holding the state by maximizing rural turnout while suffering huge losses in the big metro areas — it will “be a category five political hurricane” for local Republicans. “The state House will be gone,” he said. “We will lose three or four congressional seats. That’s an unthinkable scenario.”
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