What the Midterm Election Shows: America’s Two Parties Live In Divergent Worlds

Just as rural white voters fled the Democratic Party after Mr. Obama took office, educated suburbanites abandoned the GOP after President Trump’s election. Those trends continued Tuesday, and will not only alter the governing coalitions in Washington but also will change how and where candidates engage with the American electorate.

The results in a range of states across the Midwest, South and Southwest reshape the presidential map for the 2020 campaign, making for the largest battleground in two decades.

It exposes fundamental problems for each party. Republicans are the party of older, white Americans, many without college degrees, a demographic that is shrinking as a percentage of the population. Democrats are clustered in cities and suburbs, hampering their chances in rural districts.

And while Mr. Trump has reshaped the GOP in his image, with centrist Republicans deserting the party, Democrats head into the 2020 presidential contest facing questions about what sort of candidate can unite their coalition of minorities, young people and educated suburbanites new to the party.

After Tuesday’s election, with a few races still to be called, Democrats hold 81% of House districts with the highest shares of bachelor’s degrees, up from half of such districts in 1998. Republicans hold nearly 60% of House districts with the lowest shares of bachelor’s degrees, compared with 44% in 1998.

In the 2010 midterm election, Republicans picked up 18 suburban districts and 41 seats situated in blue-collar or rural areas. In Tuesday’s contests, they lost at least 27 suburban seats, enough to give the Democrats the House majority. The GOP forfeited just seven seats in rural or small towns.

“The base of so many Republican victories in the past, with a strong Republican vote out of suburbia, at this point looks to be a thing of the past,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican polling expert whose clients include Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. “It’s generally not a good thing when you’re trading larger fast-growing counties for smaller slow-growing counties.”

Even in places where party control didn’t change Tuesday night, Republicans saw drops in margins in important suburban areas. In Wisconsin, incumbent Republican Governor Scott Walker carried Waukesha County, with its concentration of wealthy and educated voters, by 34 percentage points. Four years ago, he won it by 46 points. That difference equaled some 21,000 fewer votes for Walker from the county. Mr. Walker lost his re-election bid by 31,000 votes.

In a postelection press conference on Wednesday, Mr. Trump chided the slate of suburban Republicans who sought to distance themselves from the White House during their campaigns. Watching on television from his district outside Philadelphia, GOP Rep. Ryan Costello tweeted that Mr. Trump’s conduct “angers me to my core.”

Mr. Costello, who chose not to face re-election this year after two terms in Congress, said in an interview that his suburban constituents who backed him and other Republicans aren’t coming back to the GOP as long as the party revolves around Mr. Trump. “If and when the suburbs revert in any way back to Republicans, it will be based on an entirely different set of political circumstances than exists right now,” he said.

The results in Iowa, long a swing state, reflect the metamorphosis of both parties. In 2008, Mr. Obama won 52 of the state’s 99 counties while taking the state by 5.5 percentage points. On Tuesday, Iowa’s Democratic candidate for governor, Fred Hubbell, carried just 11 Iowa counties but won a larger majority than Mr. Obama did in Polk County, which includes Des Moines, the state’s largest city. He lost by 3 percentage points to GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds.

Democrat Cindy Axne, whose fate was tied to the most populous part of the state, snatched a House seat held by GOP Rep. David Young. She carried just one of her district’s 16 counties, but her 30,000-vote margin in Polk was large enough to withstand losses in rural parts of the district. Much Democratic success in the suburbs comes from its lopsided appeal to educated women.

Rob Sand, a former Iowa prosecutor in the state attorney general’s office, said Democrats can’t expect to win in Iowa or nationally if they don’t figure out a way to compete in rural areas. His campaign for state auditor emphasized cultural issues. He talked about his first job catching chickens on a farm and printed campaign banners attached to trophy deer mounts.

Mr. Sand, a Democrat, won 25 of 99 counties and defeated a Republican incumbent. “People in rural Iowa often wonder if their town, and way of life, will still be there in 25 years,” Mr. Sand said Wednesday. “When they see a candidate understands that or even better, shares that way of life, it means a lot to them.”

The Republican Party has spent years shedding its centrist wing to emerge united as a conservative bastion. Democrats are still working their way on an ideological journey to the left, far from the centrist strategy employed by Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

Before the 2016 campaign, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s call to expand Medicare to all Americans was seen as a fringe idea, mocked as implausible.

Of the 50 new House Democrats declared winners after Tuesday’s election, 24 campaigned on a promise to provide Medicare for all, or at least allow people the option of buying into the government health program for the elderly. Twenty-two new incoming House Democrats called for expanding Social Security, according to an badysis by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a liberal advocacy group.

As 2020 Democratic presidential candidates engage in intraparty debate about health-care policy, party leaders must decide whether to emphasize appeals on the economy or identity-driven social issues.

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said Wednesday the party must avoid being drawn into a cultural war so that it can reach a broader set of voters concerned about bread-and-butter issues.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California kept party members mostly focused on health care during the midterms. Mr. Murphy said they would have to be “miracle workers” to maintain a focus on the economy during what is expected to be a rollicking presidential campaign.

“We’re going to have to convince our 2020 field that, in the best long-term interest of the country, they need to be focused on wage-related interest in their primary campaigns,” Mr. Murphy said. “We have to get voters in a mind-set where their No. 1 concern is: Who can beat Donald Trump?”

Steve Phillips, founder of the liberal advocacy group Democracy in Color, said Democrats can’t focus on educated suburbanites, who are predominantly white, while dismissing concerns of black and Hispanic voters.

“Democrats have only won the presidency when they’ve had a standard-bearer and a campaign that inspired and mobilized large numbers of people of color and progressive whites,” he said.

For Republicans, the challenges are less ideological than geographic.

On Tuesday, the GOP enjoyed large victory margins in small towns and sparsely populated counties. The party’s challenge is that the population in those places is shrinking.

In Missouri, GOP Sen.-elect Josh Hawley carried Ozark County, along the state’s southern border, by 51 percentage points. It produced about 4,000 votes Tuesday. Census data show its population has declined by more than 5% since 2010, and 28% of its residents are 65 or older.

In Georgia, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams won Gwinnett County, a highly educated and diverse county near Atlanta, by about 14 percentage points. Four years ago, GOP Gov. Nathan Deal carried Gwinnett by 12 points when he won re-election.

The Georgia results—Ms. Abrams trails by 65,000 votes out of 3.9 million cast in a race that has yet to be called—show some erosion in the GOP’s Southern strongholds. Mr. Trump carried Georgia by 230,000 votes.

In Texas, Democrats said Latino turnout in Rep. Beto O’Rourke Senate race proved that muscular appeals to the party’s base is a better strategy than seeking to win over former Republicans. Mr. O’Rourke lost to GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, but cut the GOP victory margin from 9 percentage points in the 2016 presidential election to less than three.

The turnout in Texas jumped to 8.2 million votes Tuesday, from 4.6 million votes in the 2014 midterm. The increase was most acute in Mr. O’Rourke’s home county of El Paso, which is 83% Hispanic. In the last midterm, 79,502 people voted in El Paso. On Tuesday, more than 200,000 people voted in the county, with roughly three-quarters supporting the hometown candidate.

Write to Reid J. Epstein at [email protected] and Janet Hook at [email protected]