Click on the video for the full report by Ronald Brownstein
In the rich and diverse 10th district of the rich and diverse congregation of Virginia in the suburbs of Washington, a strong reaction against President Trump left Republican Republican Barbara Comstock holder of the GOP endangered. Simultaneously, in the 9th Virginia White and Popular District Congress, which includes this quaint town in the far southwest corner of the state, Trump's popularity strengthens the strength of Republican Rep. Morgan Griffith, who captured the seat of a veteran Democrat during the GOP landslide of 2010.
Contrasting perspectives for Comstock and Griffith crystallize how the election of 2018 could complete the geographic restructuring of the House that has all been This was first highlighted during this GOP scan eight years ago.
In 2010, in the midst of a strong reaction against President Barack Obama, the GOP ousted dozens of Democrats from the House of Small Towns and Countryside neighborhoods; Among the victims were several people who had been in their seats for decades, such as Rick Boucher, the long-time Democratic representative of the 9th district that Griffith defeated. Now, the GOP faces the opposite risk: Democrats in November could sweep 20 or more Republicans like Comstock from districts centered on white-collar suburbs around the country's largest cities where Trump is unpopular.
"This could very easily be a mirror image (around 2010) on the Democrats' side," said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a prominent Republican strategist.
The biggest question for November, of course, is whether Democrats will get the 24 seats they need to regain a majority in the House. But, whether they do it or not, the month of November could produce a realignment of the elections that reshapes the composition of party coalitions in the House. Just as 2010 unleashed a long period of Republican advantage in small towns and rural districts, 2018 could do the same for Democrats in white-collar seats in larger metropolitan areas.
The trench separating red and blue America
The result would be a geographical separation in the House as austere as in modern times. Democrats seem to be coming out of the election this fall with a distinct advantage in the highly urbanized House seats that are racially and religiously diverse, disproportionately white-collar and secular and connected to the global economy of the United States. ;information. Republicans, in turn, could remain dominant in districts outside urban centers that are predominantly white, hard-working, more religiously traditional, and dependent on manufacturing, agriculture, and manufacturing. Extraction of resources. The ideological, demographic, economic and even physical distance between coalitions – the trench separating Red America and Blue America – could be even greater than it is today. ; hui.
"You look at the map – and any (location) that has a disproportionate rural electorate – and you can think of it as Republican in any election, and the opposite is true in the areas suburban / urban, "says Larry Sabato, a political scientist from the University of Virginia. "We've had two countries for a while, but it's as if, appropriately enough under Trump, the walls are high, they're higher than ever and I'm afraid this will be even more so in 2020 that in 2018. "
This accelerated separation leaves both parties in a precarious position. Many Republicans are concerned that under Trump they are losing support in places that add population and jobs and are increasingly relying on places that are shrinking or stagnating on both fronts.
"Unlike a wave, this (election) looks like a realignment and it's more scary," says Tom Davis, a former Republican representative of Northern Virginia, who chaired the Republican National Committee of Congress during his years in the House. "It's a bigger problem for Republicans in the long run, because we win the places that are not the rising tide (in the population), they're shrinking tide, and it's not where you want to be. "
Some Democrats, in turn, fear that even greater dominance of the larger metropolitan areas will still allow them to function with too narrow a geographic base to systematically control majorities not only in the House, but also in Senate and in electoral districts. University. In 2016, after all, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by wiping out Trump in the biggest places – she won 87 of the 100 largest counties by more than 15 million combined votes – but Trump carried the Electoral College in the # Transporting outside large urban areas in a sufficient number of states from the battlefield, from North Carolina and Florida to Michigan and Wisconsin.
"If you can combine a … respectable demonstration in some of these other parts of the country with a manifestly growing force in inner urban and suburban areas and white-collar constituencies, then you have a winning formula," says long- Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira. "The strength in these (metropolitan) areas can be offset by the structural problems in these other areas (small towns)."
The divergent dynamics that separate America from the suburbs and the small towns are clearly encapsulated in the 9th and 10th districts of the Virginia Congress. Although everyone is now represented by a Republican, the two places could hardly be more different. Whites make up nearly 90% of the population of the 9th District, but only about 61% in the 10th. Immigrants (mostly Hispanic and Asian) make up more than 20% of the population in the 10th but less than 3% in the 9th. Just over half of adults in the 10th district hold at least a four-year college degree, compared with just one in five in the ninth grade. The median income in 10th place, at $ 120,384, is almost triple the 9th level, or less than $ 42,000.
Class Reversal
The fact that the democratic outlook is increasing in the neighborhood that is richer, better educated and more racially diversified and collapsed in the district that is the opposite on every account testifies to the the biggest changes that have reshaped the electoral coalitions of both parties in recent decades. Particularly since the 1980s, parties have been experiencing what I have called a "class reversal", with the Republicans growing stronger among the white-collar workers who anchored the Democratic coalition for decades after World War II. world and the democrats. (especially women) to their traditional advantages among non-white voters.
Typically, such changes in electoral behavior were felt at the presidential level long before they got passed at congressional races. Republicans, for example, began to systematically win seats in the southern states to the presidency in 1972 but did not get the majority of seats in Congress until 1994. Similarly, Republicans have gained a strong advantage in small towns and rural areas. as of 2000, they did not immediately beat many Democrats in the House representing these regions.
Instead, the watershed election was held in 2010 for members of the Democratic House of Rural and Small Towns like Rick Boucher, who was headquartered in southwestern Virginia for almost 30 years. Boucher had deep roots in the district: he was born in Abingdon, and his grandfather had represented the region in the Virginia House of Delegates. He still remembers the city when he followed more bucolic rhythms.
"It was a place where farmers came to the market and brought their goods," Boucher told me recently in an interview in the backyard of his house in the quiet main street of Abingdon. "The city center was crowded on Saturdays, people walked from one end of the city to the other."
Butcher represented the region in the Virginia State Senate for eight years, and in 1982, he defeated a long-time Republican incumbent to win the Congress seat of the region. Boucher was closely pressed in 1984 when he narrowly survived Ronald Reagan's landslide to win a second term. After that, he was re-elected 12 times at the 9th Virginia District Convention, earning less than 59% of the vote, even as his culturally conservative, coal-producing, rural district tipped his votes toward Republican presidential candidates. The Republican presidential candidates George W. Bush in 2004 and John McCain in 2008 each transported nearly three-fifths of the district.
Butcher survived by avoiding as much cultural conflict as possible (he s. is opposed to President Bill Clinton's key gun control initiatives, for example) and focusing on economic concerns related to bread and butter.
"During all these years, I was using federal funds to build industrial parks, water and sewer systems, and I developed my own program to attract water. Industry, "he recalls.
But in 2010, the chain of Boucher is exhausted. The first two years of Obama had sparked a huge Conservative backlash in the district, with both the Affordable Care Act and the legislation passed by House Democrats to limit carbon emissions associated with global climate change emerging as powerful hot spots. Republican candidate Griffith, a former GOP leader in the House of Representatives, particularly noted Boucher's support for the carbon-capping bill, which was anathema to the region's coal-producing communities.
For Mark Matney, a teacher from Abingdon who usually votes Republican but who has sometimes supported Boucher, this was the breaking point.
"When people wanted something to be done and they went to Rick's, he seemed to get there, I mean, I saw a lot of families that he helped," I said Matney. "When Obama came in, Rick helped create a cap-and-trade system, and that's when the situation deteriorated, when he did cap and trade. of the exchange, he no longer represented his people.
Encouraged by heavy spending by conservative groups that linked Boucher to Obama and Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi in a flood of TV commercials, Griffith, a member of the Republican House, overtook the Democrat 2010 with nearly 10,000 votes.
Boucher was barely alone: the 2010 elections virtually annihilated the so-called "blue" right-wing members of the so-called Democrat House, which mostly represented white, pigeon-holed, small-town, and rural districts. Jim Oberstar in Minnesota (first elected in 1974), Gene Taylor of Mississippi (1989, in a special election), Ike Skelton of Missouri (1976), Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota (1992), Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania (1984), John Spratt of South Carolina (1982) and Chet Edwards of Texas (1990), as well as a long list of Democrats from small towns who had won more recently.
Jon Vogel, now a Democratic consultant, was executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the GOP Sweep in 2010. He says it was not the complacency that condemned the rural democrats of the blue dog, it was that many voters who had long shared their tickets between local Democrats and presidential Republicans were more willing to do so with Obama at the White House
. I do not think anyone was caught taking a nap, "says Vogel. "All these guys got ready and ran their campaigns, but you could not survive what was going to happen, you could not defeat the district's DNA, no matter how good your campaign was."
Republicans have since consolidated their hold on the old district of Boucher. Griffith earned at least three-fifths of the votes in each of his three reelections. While Boucher and other Democrats consider their candidate in 2018, farmer Anthony Flaccavento, as an energetic candidate, Griffith remains a big favorite partly because of Trump's strong popularity here. Trump got 68% of the votes in the 9th district in 2016 (the most in any district of Virginia US House) and Matney says that none of the personal and political controversies swirling around the president's necklace. started his position with the Conservatives here.
"To be 100% honest with you, no," he says. "They think it's there to do what we want it to do: protecting our guns, protecting our rights, less government, more jobs, that's all there is to it." They see, and I'm tickled to death, he's our president. "
Trump's strong ratings of white non-college and Christian voters who make up a larger share of small towns and rural districts represent a huge hurdle for Democrats in such places this fall. The party is targeting several Republicans in seats that fit this description, such as the Northeast headquarters of Iowa owned by Rod Blum, the northern Maine headquarters held by Bruce Poliquin, the headquarters of John Faso in New York. York and Rodney Davis District in Illinois.
Democratic Winds in the Suburbs
But, by far, the best opportunities for Democrats are clustered in urban and suburban areas. In these places, Trump faces much lower approval rates than usual for a Republican president among white college graduates, especially women. In the latest national survey of Quinnipiac University, Trump's net disapproval rating among white university graduates (19 negatives) was almost as bad as Obama's among white-collar workers from the Pew Research Center (20 negatives) just before the Democratic Republicans downtown in 2010.
With this downwind, Democrats are pursuing Republican suburban seats in every region. In the East, they have multiple opportunities around New York, Philadelphia, Miami and New Jersey; in Virginia, they have a strong chance not only in Comstock, but also Republican Republican Dave Brat, who occupies a seat centered on the suburbs of Richmond that rocked to the Democrats in last fall's election to the post of governor. In the Midwest, Democrats are targeting Republican suburbs around Chicago; Minneapolis; Kansas City, Missouri; Des Moines, Iowa; and more distantly Omaha, Nebraska. In the far west, Democrats have good odds in the Republican-held suburbs around Los Angeles and near Orange County; Tucson, Arizona; Denver; San Antonio; and Seattle. Democrats are also seriously challenging seats in the Sunbelt metropolitan areas that have previously been deemed safe for Republicans, including areas around Atlanta; Charlotte, North Carolina; Dallas; and Houston.
Mirror image of 2010
Republican losses in white-collar seats this year will almost certainly not match the democrats' decline in blue-collar seats in 2010 because the GOP did not not so many seats in seats that have left the party at the presidential level. But the overall dynamic and direction of change could be very similar: Suburban Republicans in 2018, like Democrats in small towns in 2010, stand on planks of support that have been rotting for years – and can not being able to survive the added weight of discontent hardening with a president of their party.
The Comstock conflict situation in the 10th Virginia District captures this problem. First elected in 2014, Comstock was re-elected in 2016 with 53% of the vote, although Clinton won 52%. With Trump in power, however, the district decisively broke last November for Democrat Ralph Northam against Republican Ed Gillespie in the governor's race and swept away several Republicans occupying seats in the state house who rode the seat from Comstock.
The first public poll of general elections in the district, by the University of Monmouth, showed the Democratic candidate, said Senator Jennifer Wexton, leading Comstock by an impressive 10 percentage points. A 53% majority of district voters said they disapproved of Trump's performance, and more than four-fifths of them said they intended to vote against Comstock .
"I think everyone looks at their race and says," How does it win in the world? "said Sabato, the political scientist at the University of Virginia.
Like many suburban Republicans, Comstock runs in a diverse district (Hispanics, Asians and minorities who classify as "others" group together for about 32% of the population). Democrats hope for the same kind of participation among them that helped Kathy Tran, a refugee from South Vietnam, win a seat in the House of Delegates last fall in a district that overlaps that of Comstock
" I think that really helped to start in 2017, it's … to be a huge tsunami in November, "said Tran, who became one of the first two Asian-American women to the House of the State. "My experience in Virginia has been that we have turned the corner and the vast majority of people want a welcoming and inclusive community."
Comstock, like other suburban Republicans, is also likely to be caught in the backlash against Trump among many white college graduates, especially women. (In the Monmouth poll, 60% of the whites in the district with a university degree disapproved of Trump's performance.) And she is facing a surge of energy among liberal-minded voters, even many who do not. They had not previously been politically active.
Amanda Kelly, a Bluemont store manager, is one of them. She did not vote until the age of 30 (for Obama in 2008) and before the 2016 elections she could not name her governor or US representative. All this changed after Trump's victory.
"At rallies I saw violence, I saw racism, aggression, terrible things (and) I thought," No, he's not going not win. "" But when he did, I decided that I had to start doing something, because Congress is the only control. "
Now Kelly has become an activist indivisible, the grassroots democratic group committed to oppose Trump, as well as other local political organizations; In the 24 hours that preceded her interview with her, last month she had participated in two separate demonstrations (one that required him to arrive at 4am to start settling) about Trump's family separation
"People feel really passionate", says she. "You know, fortunately, Trump provides a lot of fodder for that."
More than 300 miles in the southwest corner of the state Matney is equally passionate in his embrace of Trump and his determination to maintain the Republican majority of Congress that supports and defends the president. If anything, Matney says, as a socially conservative Republican, he feels more connected to Trump in the office than he has done as a candidate.
These conflicting perspectives demonstrate why the mid-term election is less likely to produce a wave that also crosses the country than a two-tier current that brings metropolitan America closer to the Democrats without violating seriously the Republican fortress beyond. This could leave Congress, and the country, blatantly across demographic and geographic divisions etched as strongly as during the most polarized periods of American history.
"This means a legislative stalemate," says Cole, the Republican representative of Oklahoma. "I always tell people that I do not have a Democratic member of Congress who lives within a 200-mile radius of me, in all directions, these divisions do not start in Washington, do not come down, are in the country and work. (…) It's been a while since we've seen this, but we're really in an era of regionalization of politics reminiscent of the 1850s. "
