Trump could sink the House GOP in suburbia - CNN

In 2018, a suburban revolt against Trump powered Democrats to sweeping gains in white-collar House districts from coast to coast.

The backlash left the GOP holding only about one-fourth of all House districts that have more college graduates than the national average, down from more than two-fifths before the election, according to a new CNN analysis of census data.

Now, recent national and district-level polls signal that many of the well-educated voters souring on Trump are also displaying more resistance to Republican congressional candidates than in 2018 -- potentially much more.

That movement could frustrate GOP hopes of dislodging many of the first-term House Democrats who captured previously Republican suburban seats in 2018.

It also means Democrats see further opportunities in white-collar House districts -- from Pennsylvania and Georgia to Indiana and especially Texas -- where the GOP held off the 2018 suburban tide, often only by narrow margins.

They argue that the 2018 Democratic incursions into previously red-leaning suburban districts represented a high-water mark, driven by a greater turnout of Democratic voters than Republican ones during the midterm election.

In the larger turnout of the presidential year, they maintain, many of these districts will snap back to their historic Republican leanings and allow both Trump and GOP House candidates to carry them again.

Bob Salera, a spokesperson for the NRCC, says the committee's baseline assumption for these races is that Trump will run as well in most white-collar districts this year as he did in 2016, when he carried almost all of the new suburban districts Democrats are targeting in November, as well as many of those that the party captured in the 2018 midterms.

"For the most part, what we are seeing is Trump's standing in these [suburban] districts is fairly close, within a couple points of where it was in the 2016 election," Salera says.

Basically, we are looking at those 2016 numbers as a baseline for how the presidential [race] will play out in these districts."

But Democrats, and even some Republicans, say that polling this spring flatly refutes the assertion that Trump's position in white-collar House districts has not deteriorated since 2016.

By comparison, even during the 2018 Democratic sweep, exit polls found that 38% of college-educated White voters approved of Trump's job performance, according to results provided by Edison Research, which conducts the exit polls for a consortium of news organizations that includes CNN.

That decline contrasted with Trump's showing among minorities in the new CNN and Monmouth polls, which found the President's approval rating with voters of color was almost exactly the same as in the 2018 exit poll, just over 1-in-4 in each case.

The Monmouth and CNN polls and a national New York Times/Siena College survey all found Biden leading Trump among well-educated White voters by about 30 percentage points, a much bigger advantage than any data source on the 2016 results recorded for Clinton.

In last week's Monmouth survey, college-educated White voters preferred Democrats over Republicans in House races by a resounding 59% to 36%.

If that disparity held through November, it would represent a huge deterioration for Republicans since 2018, when the exit polls showed Democratic House candidates nationwide carrying those voters by 8 percentage points, about one-third as much.

The flip side is also true: Many of the Democrats elected in 2018 who Republicans most hope to oust hold seats in districts with many more college graduates than average, including Reps.

Lizzie Fletcher and Colin Allred in Texas, Sharice Davids in Kansas, Elissa Slotkin and Haley Stevens in Michigan, Lucy McBath in Georgia, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, Tom Malinowski in New Jersey and all the newly elected Democrats from Orange County, California.

In 2016, when exit polls showed Trump running more competitively among college-educated White voters, he won many of the white-collar districts on both lists.

With far fewer voters than in earlier generations splitting their tickets between presidential and House candidates, the outcome in many of them may be tipped by whether he does so again.

Perhaps the best test of Trump's standing in white-collar districts will come in Texas, which Republicans have dominated since the early 1990s.

"In Texas, the Democrats performed about as well in the suburbs in 2018 as they've done in 20 or 25 years," says Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant and GOP chair in Travis County (Austin).

Democrats see opportunities

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee built on that beachhead by investing early in serious challenges in a number of Republican-held House districts, most of them better educated than average.

(In all, O'Rourke won or finished within 5 points of Cruz in 10 congressional districts now held by Republicans, and some of those other seats are beginning to secure late interest from Democrats as well.)

Sri Preston Kulkarni, the Democratic nominee for the open seat in Fort Bend County, outside of Houston, was also the party's candidate in 2018.

While Mackowiak believes that "if it's a referendum on Trump he's going to get killed in the suburbs," he maintains the President can win back previously red-leaning college-educated voters by tying Biden and Democratic House candidates to liberal ideas such as the Green New Deal and single-payer health care that might advance under unified Democratic control of government.

Still, Mackowiak acknowledges that if 2020 produces an electoral divide in Texas similar to the one in the 2018 Senate race -- with Trump holding the state by maximizing rural turnout while suffering huge losses in the big metro areas -- it will "be a category five political hurricane" for local Republicans.