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House Republicans are on the defensive in suburban strongholds as the electorate rejects President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus and calls for racial justice.
By Emily Cochrane and Catie Edmondson
BALLWIN, Mo. – For Heather Vaughn, a replacement instructor and graduate student, the resolution last month of placing the black sign with letters in her backyard, the one that said “Black Lives Matter” and “Science is Real,” felt like an act of courage.
In recent years, such a signal may have attracted unwanted attention in its tree-lined suburban neighborhood, where giant houses with well-maintained gardens had been adorned with blue ribbons and police symptoms. But he is now one of the three members of his bloc that reflects national protests opposed to police brutality and a growing sense of unease about President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus.
A self-proclaimed independent, Ms. Vaughn, 41, had supported Representative Ann Wagner, her Republican congresswoman, in recent years, but more recently has become angry with her. This year, given his frustration and anger with Trump, Vaughn is confident he won’t vote for it. Ms. Wagner wondered if she could vote for one of the local Republicans in the poll she would support.
“It’s a challenge I’ve had all my life and we haven’t solved it yet,” he said of the systemic racism that has led to recent protests across the country, just as he did in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. will be swept under the carpet unless we do something vital at the polls in November.
Suburban districts like that have long been critical bases of Republican support, filled with thriving white electorate that reliably chose Republicans to form them in Congress. Democrats took the House in 2018 making raids on communities like that, and Republicans have tied their hopes of regaining strength to preserve their remaining positions there. But as Mr. Trump continues to stumble into his reaction to the pandemic and seeks to stoke racist fears with promises to maintain the “suburban dream of life,” those districts further escape the party’s success and threaten to bring down Congressional Republicans in November’s elections.
Interviews with more than two dozen party officials, strategists and electorates in spaces like those that have revealed recent polls: that Trump’s strategy is to guide the independent electorate and even some conservative electorate, especially more knowledgeable women and Americans, who are rejected through their party appeals and disappointed by their leadership. From the suburbs of St. Louis to Omaha and Houston, they expressed deep fear about Mr. Trump’s technique of the two national crises, lamenting his certain statements that the coronavirus was under control and his resolve to stoke racial divisions after national protests opposed police brutality opposed to black Americans.
One result is that House Republicans, who began the election cycle in hopes of winning a difficult war to reclaim their majority, or at least claiming some of the competitive districts they lost to Democrats in 2018, are struggling to consolidate the seats. this would ever have required little effort to endure. Analysts on Cook’s nonpartisan political report recently announced that November could cause “a Democratic tsunami” and put Republican headlines once on an “anti-Trump wave watch list.”
“We believe that not only are we going to occupy the House, but we’re going to build the majority we have,” Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois, president of the House Democrats’ crusade arm, said in an interview. “Over the course of the month, the number of seats we think we can win continues to increase.”
Michael McAdams, spokesman for the House Republicans’ crusader branch, said in a statement that Republicans in districts could overcome national trends and noted that “voters don’t vote in July.”
Republicans “can win and will win regardless of the environment, and this cycle will be no different,” McAdams said, “especially with President Trump, who trained the Republican electorate who stayed home in 2018 and Democrats adopted an over-agenda.
Still, some voters who in the past supported Mr. Trump and his Republican allies said they had seen subtle shifts in recent months among their co-workers and friends. People who had once shied away from any political commentary were now openly criticizing the failures in the pandemic response, they said, or displaying “Black Lives Matter” signs and posters outside their homes.
Ms. Wagner, who last year created the House Suburban Caucus in components to be “a voice for our country’s developing suburbs,” is among those facing a tougher-than-expected re-election run.
In the suburbs of Douglas County, Nebraska, Derek Oden, 23, executive director of the local Republican Party, said he was rushing to expand the success of its component, recognizing that national rhetoric was fueled in part through Trump’s incendiary language “Definitely Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican, recently began to distance himself from the president , brabing to him by leading the rate of cutting the names of Confederate figures from army bases, a resolution that Mr. Trump condemned.
“I think they’re moving away from what were once Republican rules; instead of leading the culture, they let cultural advisers,” said 87-year-old Nora Haury about Republicans in an outdoor interview at their home in Omaha. “I feel a little discouraged,” he added, saying his considerations of the Democrats’ influence on the left flank of his party would keep it red in November.
Bacon will take on Kara Eastman, a progressive activist and nonprofit organizer, after beating her in two problems in 2018. Armed with pamphlets and an arsenal of pig-related puns, the congressman spent a recent afternoon knocking on doors in striking heat, convincing the moderate, independent electorate that he deserved his votes.
Cheerfully reminding those who spoke at the door that their votes can make a difference, he made little unsolicited mention of the president, responding to the pandemic’s pleas with assurances about the promising but early good fortune of a vaccine trial and highlighting the $2.2 billion stimulus bill Congress passed in March.
“I can control my message and control the ethics of my paintings,” Bacon said, adding that he believed Eastman for “Medicare for All” and other progressive proposals would repel independent voters. “Trump will be one thing in this discussion, and I don’t know where he’ll be in four months, so I can’t worry about that.”
In Texas, where Democrats are targeting five seats that were once explicitly exploited as Republican strongholds to capture giant portions of the suburbs, some determined conservative voters will now vote for Democratic congressional candidates, exasperated by the administration’s handling of the pandemic.
Cass Mattison and his wife, Samantha Mattison, who live in Sugar Land, just southwest of Houston, are registered Republicans, but plan to vote for Sri Kulkarni, a former Democratic Foreign Service official who is running to update Rep. Pete Olson, a retired Republican. They cite the “very poor management” of the pandemic through their party “from the most sensitive to the bottom.”
Mattison, who runs a daycare center, said she was exasperated for the time Trump had waited to take the virus seriously and disappointed that she had long refused to wear a mask.
“The lack of accountability kills me,” Ms. Mattison said.
As she and her husband watched hospitalizations skyrocket in Houston, they turned their attention to the election, and began to research the two Republican candidates in their district vying to succeed Mr. Olson, only to be disappointed.
“Houston is just out of control, and none of those applicants talked about what we were going to do about Covid,” Mattison, an engineer and Army veteran, said in a phone interview.
Farha Ahmed, a Sugar Land lawyer, said she had voted Republican for more than 30 years and that in the afterlife it had been a general suggestion to her county’s local Republican Party. He plans to help Mr. Kulkarni in November.
“I don’t see much leadership” from Republicans, he said in an interview. “The megaphone is with the president and that’s what has translated for all Republican leaders in Texas. This makes it very difficult for them to use what they want to do for reasons of fitness and protection.”
In Houston’s northern suburbs, Rep. Michael McCaul, the most sensible Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee he re-elected in 2018 through five points, faces a rematch from Mike Siegel, a progressive civil rights lawyer. Republican strategists say McCaul’s crusade in this cycle is much stronger, but they privately acknowledge that McCaul could fall if an unusually strong Democratic wave sweeps the country.
They’re worried about the electorate like 51-year-old Wade Miller in Cypress. Miller, in an interview, described himself as a longtime Republican, but said he was reluctant to Republicans in the upcoming election, prompting his reaction to the pandemic. He and his wife had stopped watching the national television news because listening to the president’s speech “made us a little angry there,” he said.
“I’ve been a more common direct voter, I don’t think this election is going to be ahead of it,” Miller said. “We’re talking about human lives here, and if other people aren’t willing to do whatever it takes to save lives, what else don’t they need to do? In fact, I’ll replace my vote in November.”
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