TRUMP’S SUBURBAN SLIDE
Drop in Ohio strongholds alarms Republicans, signals peril for president in the industrial north
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Peggy Lehner, a Republican state senator in Ohio, doesn’t sugarcoat what she has seen happen to support for President Donald Trump in her suburban Dayton district.
“It hasn’t ebbed. It’s crashed,” said Lehner, who isn’t seeking reelection in the district of working-class and white-collar communities the president comfortably won four years ago. “He is really doing poorly among independents.”
Trump’s chances for a second term rest heavily on being able to maintain the margins he won by in 2016, particularly in suburban areas. And Republican lawmakers and strategists in Ohio say research that shows a nearuniform drop in support from his 2016 totals across every suburban region of the state.
They say Trump, who won Ohio by 8 percentage points in 2016, maintains a yawning advantage in more rural areas and small towns.
Still, Republicans are concerned that, if he’s losing badly in suburban areas in Ohio, it’s a sign that his hold on other industrial states that delivered him the presidency could be in peril.
“The million-dollar question becomes: How does that translate in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania?” said Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist who managed Ohio Sen. Rob Portman’s 2016 reelection campaign. “It translates into probably not a very good night.”
No Republican has won the White House without carrying Ohio since the advent of the modern two-party system, and no Democrat has since 1960.
Trump is faring worse than four years ago in essentially all suburban areas around Ohio, more than a half dozen Republican operatives tracking races across Ohio say.
They say the president’s support has slipped in suburbs to the east and west of Cleveland, where he narrowly edged Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016. In the blue-collar suburbs of Youngstown, where Trump won by double digits, the same appears to be true.
In affluent suburbs, such as Dublin, northwest of Columbus, 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney won by nearly 20 percentage points. Four years later, Trump narrowly lost to Clinton.
Less than two months before the 2020 election, Republicans were concerned about signs the trend in Dublin has continued, according to several Republican operatives following legislative and congressional races.
Former Ohio Republican Party Chairman Kevin DeWine, a second cousin to Gov. Mike DeWine, said, “I just don’t see him getting more votes.”
Ohio GOP strategist Doug Preisse disagrees: “I perceive a commensurate intensification in the support for Trump in small towns.”
There is less debate in other states. Pennsylvania Republicans say across the longtime Republican Party stronghold of Chester County west of Philadelphia, for instance, Trump has slipped as far as he has in Ohio’s suburbs, though in more populous towns and in a state he carried by fewer than 45,000 votes.
Former Pennsylvania Rep. Ryan Costello, a Republican, said that the suburban electorate is rapidly diversifying in ways that hurt Trump, especially among young families and people concerned about the coronavirus.
Hillary Clinton carried Chester County by almost 10 percentage points.
“I think that there is a higher likelihood at this moment in time that Trump performs worse in the suburbs,” Costello said. “It’s his tone. It’s the chaos. Perhaps a combination. But certainly the pandemic, the mismanagement of the pandemic.”
Just west of the state capital, Harrisburg, Cumberland County’s rapid development is diversifying the capital city’s longtime Republican-leaning suburbs. The combination of growth and generally declining support for Trump across suburbs has hurt the president in south-central Pennsylvania’s competitive 10th Congressional District, where Trump won by 9 percentage points in 2016, said Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
A central question is whether Trump can, as his campaign predicts, spur even more support than in 2016 from rural voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
“Trump is leading in these areas but nowhere near by the percentage he won them by in 2016,” said Madonna, who has conducted polls in the state for more than three decades.
Republicans have similar concerns about suburbs in Michigan, notably in Oakland County, Detroit’s more upscale neighbor.
Trump has lost support in the populous suburbs of southeast Wisconsin since 2016, according to the Marquette University Law School poll.
He needs to be “blunting the departures in the suburbs and juicing the rural areas,” said John Selleck, who ran Romney’s 2012 Michigan campaign. “But can he make up the lost suburban votes elsewhere?”