Question of 2022 midterms: How will the suburbs swing?
PAPILLION, Neb. — Pursuing a bipartisan infrastructure deal and trumpeting a revived economy and progress against the pandemic, President Joe Biden is trying to persuade the nation that Democrats are the party that gets things done. His message is aimed at holding on to a set of voters in next year’s midterms who could determine the fate of his agenda: suburbanites who abandoned former President Donald Trump in droves.
More than any other group, those independent-minded voters put Biden in the White House. Whether they remain in the Democratic coalition is the most urgent question facing the party as it tries to keep its razor-thin advantage in the House and the Senate next year.
Biden made his pitch again Friday when he signed an executive order intended to protect consumers from the anti-competitive practices of large businesses.
But Republicans are also going to war for suburban votes. The party is painting the six-month-old Biden administration as a failure, one that has lost control of the Southwestern border, is presiding over soaring crime rates and rising prices, and is on the wrong side of a culture clash over how schools teach the history of racism in America.
Whoever wins this messaging battle will have the power to determine the outcome of the rest of Biden’s term, setting the stage for either two more years of Democrats driving their policies forward or a new period of gridlock in a divided Washington.
Both parties are targeting voters such as Jay Jackson, a retired career Air Force officer who is now a reservist in the Omaha suburbs. Jackson had lawn signs last year for Republicans running for Congress, but also for Biden. He thought that Trump had failed to empathize with military duty and regularly lied to Americans, and did not deserve reelection.
“I’m a classic RINO,” Jackson said with a laugh, accepting the right’s favorite insult for voters like him: Republicans in Name Only.
In a guest column in the Omaha World-Herald, Jackson, a 39-year-old lawyer, explained his view: “We Republicans need to turn away from Trump and back to our values and the principles of patriotism and conservatism.”
Biden won 54% of voters from the country’s suburbs last year, a significant improvement over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and enough to overcome Trump’s expansion of his own margins in rural and urban areas, according to new data from the Pew Research Center. Suburbanites made up 55% of the Biden coalition, compared with 48% of Clinton voters.
The authoritative Pew study, which echoed other recent surveys, also showed that Biden failed to increase his share of the Democratic base from 2016, including among young people and voters of color. It found, however, that his support surged among independents, veterans and married men — voters like Jackson.
But even as Jackson crossed party lines for Biden, he supported Rep. Don Bacon, a Republican, who won reelection in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which Biden carried. Jackson said that he was pleased so far with the Biden administration — especially its “putting the accelerator to the floor on COVID” — but that he would very likely vote again for Bacon.
It shows that in 2022, Democrats will need to count on more than the revolt of suburbia against Trump’s norm-smashing presidency to motivate their voters.
The limits of the antiTrump vote were already glimpsed last year, when half of the 14 House seats that Democrats lost, to their shock, were in suburban or exurban districts. The party also failed to defeat vulnerable Republicans in districts Biden won, such as Nebraska’s 2nd.
For 2022, Democrats’ congressional finance committee has identified 24 “front line” incumbents in swing districts, about two-thirds of them in suburban areas.
Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., chair of the party’s election arm, aims to fuse Republican candidates with Trump’s divisiveness and with the party’s obstruction of gun restrictions, expanding health care access and fighting climate change.
“The post-Trump Republican brand is bad politics in the suburbs,” he said in an interview. “They have embraced dangerous conspiracy theories, flat-out white supremacists, and a level of harshness and ugliness that is not appealing to suburban voters.”