Trip Gabriel, Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns

In the Virginia suburbs of Norfolk, Richmond, and Washington, D.C., Democratic candidates flipped six legislative seats from Republican control Tuesday — crucial gains that helped Democrats take control of both chambers of the legislature and put state government under one-party control for the first time in a generation. Many Democrats ran on gun control issues and other local concerns, but also excoriated Trump’s conduct in office.

In suburbs around Philadelphia, which were battlegrounds in the 2016 election and will be again in 2020, Democrats notched historic wins. They defeated the last Republicans on the five-seat Delaware County Council, in a suburb that kept electing Republicans to local offices while rejecting many Republican statewide candidates, and they took control of the board of commissioners in Bucks County for the first time since the 1980s.

And in the Kentucky governor’s race Tuesday, Democrats carried the home counties of Louisville and Lexington by nearly triple the margin they ran up in the 2015 governor’s race. Four years ago, too, the Republican candidate for governor, Matt Bevin, carried the conservative Kentucky suburbs south of Cincinnati; this time around, two of those three counties broke for the Democratic candidate, Andy Beshear.

Bevin, who was on the ballot this week seeking a second term as governor, is now about 5,100 votes behind Beshear, who has claimed victory. Bevin on Wednesday formally asked state officials to undertake a check and recanvass of the voting machines and absentee ballots in the race, citing “irregularities” without providing details.

For Trump and other Republican leaders, the ongoing political realignment of the suburbs — which was essential to Democrats flipping Republican-held congressional seats in 2018 and retaking the House — is a disconcerting disadvantage that they have shown little ability to reverse. Democratic officials, in turn, increasingly believe they can press a center-left agenda with little risk of backlash because moderate voters will remain in their grip as long as Trump is in office and effectively make the GOP a no-go zone for this demographic.

“Our coalition is growing and is more secure,” said Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island, the chair of the Democratic Governors Association, before quickly adding that Democrats cannot take their new voters for granted. “You have to earn it,” said Raimondo, counseling her party’s candidates to avoid ideological purity tests and instead focus on conveying to voters “that we’re going to do a better job making their lives easier.”

But she couldn’t help noting one factor behind the party’s good fortune. “Even some Republicans are just done with President Trump,” she said.

For his part, Trump focused on other Republican victories in Kentucky on Tuesday night, an implicit nod to Bevin’s own unpopularity with voters. He also argued that his rally in Kentucky on Monday night had helped Bevin gain “at least 15 points in last days.” In truth, every public and private poll showed a single-digit contest in the final weeks of the race.

In interviews Wednesday afternoon in the suburbs of Richmond, several voters said they had decided to cast ballots for Democrats in part because of their frustration with Trump.

Katie Morris, a grant writer, said she didn’t “have a problem with the conservative agenda” and usually voted Republican. But no longer.

“In general, I am very turned off by the way our country is going,” Morris said, the day after voters in her district west of Richmond elected the first Muslim woman to the state Senate — Ghazala Hashmi, a Democrat who will replace a Republican incumbent.

“In general these days I’m pretty liberal-leaning as a result of Trump,” Morris said.

But another voter, Martha Grattan, was feeling plenty ideological Wednesday after the Republicans she supports had fared badly. Asked what was on her mind as she cast her ballot, she said, “Next year.”

“I want Republicans to be put back in office next year,” she added, referring to Trump and GOP members of Congress.

For decades, these suburbs were cornerstones of the Republican electoral coalition, a vital constituency for conservative candidates seeking to overcome Democrats’ popularity in densely populated cities and populist rural precincts. But these areas have steadily shifted away from the GOP as the party has come to be defined less by its traditional center-right agenda — like taxes and public safety — than by the preoccupations of rural white conservatives, on matters like protecting gun rights, restricting abortion and cracking down on illegal immigration.

Trump’s election in 2016 drastically accelerated that migration away from the Republican Party, spurring an exodus of already-uneasy moderate voters away from a party defined by Trump’s caustic persona and hard-right views on race and immigration.

Each year since Trump took office has brought new evidence of his party’s decline in these areas, rich with college-educated voters and upwardly mobile communities of immigrants and young people. In 2009, in the first year of Obama’s presidential term, the suburbs of Northern Virginia propelled the GOP to a sweep of the statewide offices. Eight years later, it was Democrats who rolled through counties like Fairfax and Loudoun to seize all of the state’s constitutional offices by wide margins.

There was no sign in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia and other states this week that Republicans are close to containing the damage Trump has done in these kinds of areas, let alone reversing it. Democratic Party leaders, meanwhile, emerged from Election Day with the optimism that they are building on the gains they made in the 2018 midterms. A year after Democrats claimed 40 House seats and a series of governorships thanks to a surge of support from suburbanites, the results in Virginia in particular make clear that their drift from the GOP won’t be easily reversed.

Virginia’s Democratic governor, Ralph Northam, made clear Wednesday that he plans to take advantage of the historic shift from red to blue in his state, showing no signs of worry that Democrats might pay a price at the ballot box in 2020 if they push an aggressive policy agenda.

In an open meeting of his cabinet, Northam said “we have a unique opportunity in the next two years,” saying “the landscape has changed” and that he planned to push for a major new package of gun control policies, criminal justice reform, early childhood education, the decriminalization of marijuana and greater access to health services.

He particularly zeroed in on gun legislation, a divisive issue in parts of once-red Virginia but a political priority for many suburban voters.

“I really think a large part of the results that we saw yesterday were Virginians saying they’ve had enough,” Northam said. He noted that he called a special session of the General Assembly in July to consider eight gun measures, following a mass shooting in Virginia Beach that took 12 lives, but Republicans called it a stunt and quickly voted to adjourn.

“We had less than 90 minutes of dialogue, with no results,” Northam said.

Hashmi, the victorious candidate for State Senate outside Richmond, had focused much of her campaign on enacting new gun control restrictions. Everytown for Gun Safety, former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s gun control organization, contributed $102,000 to her campaign, while the National Rifle Association did not contribute to her Republican opponent’s campaign.

Everytown said it gave $2.5 million to back Democrats in Virginia. The NRA gave $350,269 to Republican candidates and organizations, according to state campaign finance records.

Beshear, the Kentucky Democrat, also asserted himself politically on Wednesday, saying he would push ahead with a transition to power and would soon start naming members to his cabinet and filling other roles in his administration.

At a news conference, though, he stuck to a conciliatory message of bridging political divides in Kentucky by focusing on issues where there was common ground — the kind of messaging that many suburban voters like to hear.

“Last night, the election ended,” Beshear told reporters, standing with members of a local teachers union in the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville. He noted a looming deadline to submit a state budget in January. “The politics part of this is over,” he added. “It’s time for governance.”

Beshear declined to extrapolate any lessons for the broader Democratic Party based on his success in Kentucky. Indeed, he strained to avoid tying himself to national political issues and focused narrowly on the statewide issues that had been at the heart of Bevin’s unpopularity as governor, like public education, pensions for public employees and health care.

“I’m not worried about what national pundits or what national Democrats are saying,” Beshear said. “I’m worried about our families here in Kentucky and doing a good job for them.” He added, “I believe this race is about our families wanting someone that cares about them, that reflects their values and is focused on those issues that they are anxious about at the end of the day.”

In Virginia, several voters made clear that they, too, wanted politicians to focus on state and local issues, though some were also focused on Washington. In interviews, some voters said their passions were not so much aimed at impeaching Trump, as at wanting the president to act more presidential, and for Congress to work together to move the country forward.

Schuyler VanValkenburg, a Democrat re-elected to his House seat in Henrico County, which he first won in 2017 in the first phase of a blue wave that has reshaped the politics of the suburbs under Trump, said suburban voters are less partisan than many people assume.

“Henrico County is not an ideological place,” he said. Educational opportunity for their children and the chance of a better life for the next generation are what people care about,” he said.

It’s also increasingly diverse. The school district where VanValkenburg teaches 12th-grade government includes students who together speak more than 80 languages. Voters, he said, “want pragmatic, sound governance.”

“What we’ve seen is a Republican Party that’s becoming increasingly ideological,” he said.

This article originally appeared in

RICHMOND, Va. — For the second Election Day in as many years, suburban voters demonstrated enormous political power in electing or aiding Democratic candidates in historically Republican areas, underscoring the drift of many moderate voters from the GOP in the era of President Donald Trump.

A Cornerstone of the GOP Turns Wobbly

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Trip Gabriel, Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns

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A Cornerstone of the GOP Turns Wobbly