RICHMOND,
Va. — The American suburbs appear to be in revolt against President
Trump after a muscular coalition of college-educated voters and racial
and ethnic minorities dealt the Republican Party a thumping rejection on Tuesday and propelled a diverse class of Democrats into office.
From
the tax-obsessed suburbs of New York City to high-tech neighborhoods
outside Seattle to the sprawling, polyglot developments of Fairfax and
Prince William County, Va., voters shunned Republicans up and down the
ballot in off-year elections. Leaders in both parties said the elections
were an unmistakable alarm bell for Republicans ahead of the 2018
campaign, when the party’s grip on the House of Representatives may
hinge on the socially moderate, multiethnic communities near major
cities.
“Voters
are taking their anger out at the president, and the only way they can
do that is by going after Republicans on the ballot,” said
Representative Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania. “If this isn’t a
wake-up call, I don’t know what is.”
The
Democrats’ gains signaled deep alienation from the Republican Party
among the sort of upscale moderates who were once central to their
coalition.
Democrats
not only swept Virginia’s statewide races but neared a majority in the
House of Delegates, a legislative chamber that was gerrymandered to make
the Republican majority virtually unassailable. They seized county
executive offices in Westchester and Nassau Counties, N.Y., and carried
bellwether mayoral elections in St. Petersburg, Fla., and Manchester,
N.H., all races that appeared to favor Republicans only months ago.
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In
Washington State, Democrats won a special election to take control of
the State Senate, establishing total Democratic dominance of government
on the West Coast. Democrats took council seats in vote-rich Delaware County, Pa., in the Philadelphia suburbs, a perennial congressional battleground.
Even
in the Deep South, Georgia Democrats captured two State House seats
where they previously had not even fielded candidates while snatching a
State Senate seat in Buckhead, an upscale area of Atlanta.
“Republicans
are being obliterated in the suburbs,” said Chris Vance, a former
chairman of the Washington State Republican Party, who placed the blame
squarely on Mr. Trump. “Among college-educated suburbanites, he is a
pariah.”
Democrats
still face formidable obstacles in the 2018 election, including some
not at work in this week’s elections. If a suburban insurrection might
help Democrats take the House, the Senate seats at stake next year are
overwhelmingly in conservative, rural states, where feelings about Mr.
Trump range from ambivalent to positive. So far, only two Republican
Senate seats are clearly in play: the one in Arizona being vacated by
Jeff Flake and Dean Heller’s in Nevada.
Diverse Candidates Make History in Local Elections
A transgender lawmaker in Virginia, a
Sikh mayor in New Jersey and a refugee mayor in Montana were among
Democrats’ victories in state and local elections. Was this a one-off
rebuke of President Trump or a sign of what’s to come in next year’s
midterms?
By CHRIS CIRILLO on Publish Date November 8, 2017.
Photo by Al Drago for The New York Times.
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In
House races, Democratic candidates are likely to face Republican
attacks tying them to Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the
unpopular Democratic minority leader, and to liberal policies, like
single-payer health care, that are causing divisions in the Democratic
ranks.
But for Republicans, the bad news was not likely to end with Tuesday’s results.
Congressional
Republicans on Wednesday were bracing for a new wave of retirements
just one day after another pair of veteran House members, Representative
Frank A. LoBiondo of New Jersey and Representative Ted Poe of Texas, declared they would not seek re-election. Mr. Dent, channeling the exasperation of his colleagues, suggested an exodus might be imminent.
“Do
they really want to go through another year of this?” said Mr. Dent, a
leader of his caucus’s moderate wing, who has already announced he will
not run again.
In the White House, electoral defeat gave way to a shifting series of explanations: Mr. Trump’s first reaction was to savage Ed Gillespie,
the defeated Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, on Twitter.
By Wednesday morning, two presidential advisers acknowledged antipathy
toward Mr. Trump would probably drive Democratic turnout next year.
But
by Wednesday afternoon, the story changed again: At a White House
briefing, aides dismissed the importance of New Jersey and Virginia in
either 2018 or 2020. One White House official blamed congressional
Republicans, asserting that swing voters on Tuesday embraced Democrats
because they were frustrated that lawmakers had not moved on the
president’s agenda.
But
some of the most competitive House races of the 2018 midterms will take
place in the two states. In New Jersey, Republicans will struggle to
retain Mr. LoBiondo’s seat and must protect such imperiled incumbents as
Leonard Lance, Tom MacArthur and Rodney Frelinghuysen. In Virginia, the district of Representative Barbara Comstock, a Republican, went 56 percent to 43 percent
for Lt. Gov. Ralph S. Northam, the Democrats’ triumphant candidate for
governor. Mr. Northam also captured 51 percent of the votes in the
district of Representative Scott Taylor, a freshman Republican from
Virginia Beach.
Democrats
were as buoyant as Republicans were dejected. Democratic Party leaders
gleefully predicted that the Senate, where Republicans hold a two-seat
majority, might now be in play, and they said their fund-raising and
candidate recruitment would take off going into the new year.
“We’ll
get a lot of candidates who are going to want to run, and I think for
donors who have been on the sidelines, dispirited for the last year, I’m
telling you, people are jazzed up,” said Gov. Terry McAuliffe of
Virginia, the ever-upbeat former national Democratic Party chairman.
To
many Democrats and some Republicans, Tuesday’s results recalled the
last time an unpopular Republican was in the White House and voters
vented their frustrations on a Republican-held Congress. In 2005,
Democrats rolled to victory in Virginia and New Jersey, presaging an
electoral wave in 2006 and inspiring throngs of Democrats to run for
office in difficult districts.
Representative
Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, the chairman of the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee, said he had spent Tuesday evening
calling potential House candidates and urging them to watch the returns,
telling them, “I just want to encourage you to turn on the television,
if it’s not already on.”
“Democrats
down there were very aggressive about expanding their map and
recruiting strong candidates, even where they were told they couldn’t
win,” Mr. Luján said of Virginia. “We’re going to make our Republican
colleagues fight for every inch.”
In
the Senate, too, Democrats are seeking to expand the map. Facing a
narrow path to a majority, they are strenuously wooing Phil Bredesen, a
former Tennessee governor, to run for the seat that Senator Bob Corker
is vacating. Mr. Bredesen has been courted personally by Senator Chuck
Schumer of New York, the minority leader, as well as several former
governors who now serve in the Senate, including Mark Warner of
Virginia, according to Democrats briefed on the overtures. And the
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee commissioned a poll aimed at
coaxing Mr. Bredesen to run.
Mr. Bredesen is in Washington this week for meetings and is said to be nearing a decision.
Democrats
won on Tuesday with a historically diverse slate of candidates: Having
long struggled to bring diversity to the leadership tier of their party,
they elected the first transgender legislator in the country, the first
Vietnamese-American legislator in Virginia, the first African-American
female mayor of Charlotte, N.C., and the first black statewide officer
in Virginia in more than a quarter-century, among other groundbreaking
candidates.
Kathy
Tran, a Vietnamese immigrant who was elected to the House of Delegates
in a Fairfax-based seat that Republicans previously held, said voters
there had mobilized to rebuke Mr. Trump and his brand of politics. She
urged national Democrats to follow Virginia’s example by recruiting
candidates from many backgrounds for the midterms.
“This
was a clear rejection of racism and bigotry and hateful violence,” Ms.
Tran said of the elections, adding, “People are hungry for a government
that reflects the diversity of our communities.”
County-level
results captured the dizzying scale of the lurch away from Republicans:
In Virginia, Mr. Northam captured outer Washington suburbs, including
Prince William and Loudoun Counties, by 20 percentage points or more,
where other Democrats prevailed by single digits in the recent past. He
won Virginia Beach, an area Mr. Trump carried last year, by five
percentage points.
In
New Jersey, Mr. Murphy carried the densely populated New York and
Philadelphia suburbs by staggering margins, including counties that
broke for Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, eight years ago.
And
in Delaware County, Pa., long home to a fearsome Republican machine,
Democrats won seats on the county council for the first time since the
1970s thanks to a local campaign that featured yard signs that got
straight to the point: “Vote Nov. 7th Against Trump.”
Former
Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, the last Republican to win a major office in
Virginia, said the enthusiasm of liberal voters simply overwhelmed his
party.
“The enthusiastic left showed up tonight in big numbers,” he said, “and really determined the outcome of the election.”
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