As Donald Trump pulls out every nationalistic xenophobic trick in his political playbook, House Republicans in suburban swing districts are taking a beating this election. While there's a more data-driven case to be made for this, the New York Times is supplying anecdotal evidence from voters in districts where GOP incumbents are struggling to hang on to their seats.
Take Republican Rep. John Culberson in TX-07, a district now squarely viewed as toss-up territory after not electing a Democrat since the 1960s. In 2016, Houston-based attorney J. Mark Metts split his ticket between Culberson for Congress and Hillary Clinton for president. Not this time.
“With Congress not really standing up to Trump, this election is becoming a referendum,” Metts told the Times, explaining why he won't be voting for Culberson this time around.
Another suburban voter who won't be splitting her ticket this year is Pennsylvania suburbanite Shelley Howland, who backed Clinton for president but voted for down-ballot Republicans, including Brian Fitzpatrick.
“This year, it’s going to be a straight Democratic ticket,” said Ms. Howland, 65, lamenting “this whole movement to the alt-right, Steve Bannon in the White House, Trump in the White House.”
The shift is scaring GOP operatives.
“I’m not hearing anything helpful at all,” said Gene DiGirolamo, a Republican state legislator from Bucks County, part of Fitzpatrick's district.
GOP Texas Speaker of the House, Joe Straus, echoed DiGirolamo, calling it "unthinkable" that Culberson and his Dallas counterpart, Rep. Pete Sessions, are both facing hotly contested races. Straus said Trump has “changed the Republican Party in ways that are just less appealing to the traditional Republicans and independents we’ve always relied on.”
The long-term damage that might do to the party is what many Republicans really fear—especially if they lose a demographic of reliable voters like college-educated white women. Such a shift could upend the political landscape for the party, losing more well to-do whites in relatively populous suburbs even as they gain some less affluent whites in less populated rural areas.
