END OF THE ROAD
The GOP’s future depends on America’s suburbs
ROBERT Francis O’Rourke, who campaigns under the pseudoHispanic nickname “Beto,” had his moment. National Democrats were hopeful that the callow young congressman from El Paso was the one to knock off Ted Cruz, a victory that would announce the their party’s ascendance in Texas. He was to be the crest of the blue wave. The wave is receding. With the election imminent, Cruz is ahead by 7 points in the RealClearPolitics poll average, and O’Rourke has never even managed to cross the 45-percent threshold. But it is a tighter race than Texas Republicans like to see.
For a fuller indicator of the state of Texas politics, consider the governor’s race — and there is one, in case you haven’t heard. The Democrat is running 20 points behind the Republican incumbent and will probably end up finishing around the same place as Wendy Davis, the last Democratic messiah in Texas, who won less than 40 percent of the vote in the 2014 governor’s race.
If you got your news from late-night comedians, you’d think the Republican brand was poison. But, electorally, it has been doing awfully well: The GOP holds a majority in both houses of Congress, in 67 of the nation’s 99 state legislative chambers and 33 of the 50 governorships. Some of that is going to change after the midterms, but the GOP’s position is likely to remain strong. The share of voters who identify as Republican or Republican-leaning independents dropped after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, but it has more than recovered and is today 1 point higher (up from 43 to 44) while the Democrats’ number has declined by 1 point (from 48 to 47).
Republicans do have serious electoral challenges, nationally and in Texas. They perform poorly in cities, and Texas, for all its wide-open spaces, is a more urban place than you may realize, home to six of the nation’s 25 largest cities. The city of San Antonio has nearly twice the population of San Francisco. Arlington, once a sleepy suburb, is today larger than New Orleans or Cleveland, and Plano is more populous than Orlando or Newark. Republicans do better in the suburbs than in the cities, but that isn’t necessarily enough: In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 54 percent of the vote in Harris County, which comprises Houston and its closer suburbs, 54 percent in Bexar County (San Antonio), 60 percent in Dallas County, 66 percent in Travis County (Austin), 69 percent in El Paso County and 74 percent in Webb County (Laredo).
In Texas as in the country at large, Republicans lose the big cities, sweep the rural areas and split the suburbs.
That suburban split will determine the GOP’s future.
The GOP has been down this road before. For a generation, Republicans lost the city of Philadelphia but won bigly in its suburbs. In suburbia, Republicans are victims of their own success — and, perversely, Democrats are beneficiaries of their own failures. Philadelphia lost half a million people between 1960 and 2000 as its residents fled its high taxes, high crime. Some of them went to Texas.
But mostly, they went to the Philadelphia suburbs. And they brought their politics with them.
As recently as the early aughts, people in tony Lower Merion, Pa., joked that you had to be a Republican to get your trash picked up. The change has been top-to-bottom: In 2015, Democrats won five of five open schoolboard seats; in 2016, Clinton won 75 percent of the vote there. The changing Philadelphia suburbs upended the politics of Pennsylvania, just as the changing DC suburbs have upended the politics of Virginia. From the bedroom communities of Pittsburgh to those of Chicago and Houston, similar stories have played out as relatively affluent and educated suburban voters — especially women — have moved toward the Democrats.
The Republicans are worried about losing Texas. They need to worry about losing suburbia.