Nothing impacts a community more than being written off by a political party, except being taken for granted by a political party.
Both parties have done that over and over again in this country. No majority is ever permanent, yet realignments are rare. When they do happen they are a prolonged process.
Currently it is the Democrats who are feeling the burden of both writing off and taking for granted voters. Oh, Democrats in Washington and New York might not be ready to admit that — they are still too busy debating the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s election.
But smart strategists who are on the ground and have seen Democratic elected office holders sizably shrink over the past eight years sure know it. Their livelihoods depend on it.
Tiny little rural villages and former industrial towns across the country that were once happily part of the New Deal Democratic coalition that held together for generations have been both neglected and taken for granted since the end of President Bill Clinton’s presidency.
They’ve also been mocked, a lot, by their party of birth.
Much of that simultaneous isolation occurred because they had no more political juice; their regions, which became stitched together in state legislative and congressional districts, have declined due to poverty, lost manufacturing bases, the deterioration of the family farm and shrinking populations.
Conversely, urban areas, thanks to gentrification, academia and technology have become more populous, packing in their urban districts an incredible amount of influence, clout, wealth and an abundance of the rising American electorate — minorities and young people.
In between these two polar voting blocs; the suburbs. On one hand they are connected to the roots of their rural or post-industrial communities they escaped from or perhaps their parents did.
On the other hand the popular culture influence of progressivism has an allure.
In short, it is in the suburbs where Democrats can find their way out of the wilderness or where Republicans can grow and solidify their local majorities not just in state legislative bodies, but also in the House.
The Democrats path back to the House majority before the 2016 election was in the affluent suburbs where Donald Trump underperformed Mitt Romney’s numbers in 2012.
“Those suburban districts are located in places like Southern California, Northern Virginia, parts of Texas, and Metro Atlanta. Republican incumbents in these places generally won reelection, but if Trump is unpopular in 2018, angry voters in these places will only be able to punish him down the ballot,” explained Kyle Kondik, political analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
If Democrats can find some fiscally moderate candidates they might be able to put some of these districts in play.
Kondik points to Josh Gottehimer, who just won the 5th Congressional District seat in New Jersey, as a model for Democrats to build off of; implementing a 2006-style strategy in areas less likely to be culturally conservative on issues like guns.
The problem for Democrats is that they read the election results as a rejection of moderation and are convinced they should turn harder left, not a smart path for the 2018 midterms or for 2020.
However, it’s also possible that the Democrats go left and make gains anyway because the Republicans own the government now, and they own anything bad that happens during Trump’s watch said Kondik, “I wouldn’t say that Republicans moderated much in the Obama years and ultimately it didn’t prevent them from winning the unified government they will control later this month,” he said.
One of the most interesting things for both parties is the lack of crossover voting in the House and Senate. While of course many voters split their tickets in different races, ticket-splitting isn’t as common as it was in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
“Our current era is more similar to about a century ago, when party loyalty was stronger and there were roughly similar, small numbers of ‘crossover’ House districts as there are now,” said Kondik.
Let’s compare 1976 to 2016, which was another close election that was a two-point race nationally (Jimmy Carter won by two points.)
In that election, 124 of 435 House districts voted differently for House and for president.
This time, it appears that only 35 districts had crossover results.
“Again, this speaks to a higher level of party unity compared to 40 years ago, something we are also seeing in the Senate — this was the first election in the history of Senate popular elections that every state voted the same party for Senate and president,” Kondik explained.
What stands out for the immediate future is that even though the Republicans have a big House majority, they are not really all that overextended in the House.
There appear to be 23 Republicans in districts Hillary Clinton won, and the Democrats need to net 24 seats to win the House majority.
“However, going into the 2010 midterms, Democrats held 48 seats that John McCain had won in 2008,” said Kondik. This made them more overextended.
Additionally, many of the Clinton-seat Republicans are well-established incumbents such as Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, Peter Roskam of Illinois, Dave Reichert of Washington and Erik Paulsen of Minnesota, to name some.
“So long as they run for reelection, they are going to be hard for Democrats to beat. That’s not to say the Democrats can’t compete for the House — it’s just to say that they likely will need Donald Trump to be very unpopular and for other national factors to break their way,” he said.
Yet despite holding a big majority, Republicans can plausibly target some Trump-seat Democrats.
In short there are a dozen such seats, and some of them swung very hard to Trump in 2016, like Rep. Matt Cartwright’s seat in which contains Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, and other parts of northeastern Pennsylvania.
The district went from Obama 55-43 to Trump 54-43, a massive 23-point net shift toward the Republicans.
“There are other places with Democratic House incumbents that shifted in similar ways, including three districts in Minnesota. These districts potentially provide opportunities to Republicans in 2018 and beyond,” said Kondik.
One of the most fascinating swings in the country though belongs to Rep. Bill Johnson’s district in Ohio’s Appalachia, which went from 55-43 Romney to 69-27 Trump. In 2010 no one saw his win coming in the late Rep. Charlie Wilson’s seat, once held by former Ohio governor Ted Strickland, who was pummeled by U.S. Sen. Rob Portman by 21 points in the Ohio senate race in November.
Back to the suburbs. They still went big for Republican candidates, who won three million more votes than Democrat candidates across the country.
That is a lot of rejection, something Democrats will have to endure for the foreseeable future. Democrats cannot just rely on minority voters. What do they do? Begin with courting their New Deal Democrats rather than mocking them. And for those suburban Republicans who did not care for Trump and cast a vote for Hillary Clinton, find a way to keep them on their side.
While the Republicans are in the cat bird seat with historic majorities, politics is always moving forward, which could be the Democrats way ahead if they are smart.
One thing is for certain, the swing voter lives in the suburbs as Brad Todd, founding partner of OnMessage strategies, pointed out in his story in the Federalist.
Todd explains that “America now has two groups of swing voters: center-right suburbanites and rural populists. Politicians ignore either group at their own peril.”
He’s right.
Salena Zito is a columnist for the Washington Examiner.
