Media focuses too much attention on the wrong voters

Every outrageous Trumpian appointment, action or statement is a reminder of the far-reaching impact of presidential elections, even when the results look retrospectively like political flukes.

Jimmy Carter’s 1976 victory, by 17,000 votes in two states during a Republican era, was one. Donald Trump’s in 2016, by some 77,000 votes in three states, may have been another.

An inept Democratic campaign and negative attitudes toward Hillary Clinton prompted crucial swing voters in those states to take a chance on an opponent about whom they had grave doubts. A year later, those doubts appear to have been confirmed.

Trump has the worst job approval of any modern president, and his Republicans just suffered a spate of off-year election defeats in which those very swing voters turned out in strong numbers to express their disdain toward him by defeating GOP candidates.

Trump retains a solid base of between 35 and 40 percent of the electorate. He has more than enough time to convince wavering 2016 supporters they made wise judgments. But he has so far shown little inclination to do that, increasing prospects that current attitudes will solidify and produce a national Republican repudiation next November like last week’s in Virginia and several other suburban areas.

One reason the extent of the Democrats’ Virginia rout was unexpected may be that we in the media have focused too much attention on the wrong Trump voters. Since 2016, many organizations have interviewed and analyzed the rural and blue collar white voters whose substantial support for Trump they missed last year. But the election key may have been anti-Clinton attitudes among suburbanites who supported Trump or stayed home.

That disdain was evident at several focus groups conducted by Democratic pollster Peter Hart last year, even among some planning to vote for her. It clearly prompted many others to back Trump despite grave concerns about his character, experience, and policies on the economy and foreign policy.

In Pennsylvania, which Trump won by less than 1 percent, exit polls showed half of his voters had reservations about him or primarily disliked Clinton, as opposed to strongly supporting Trump. About 10 percent of his voters felt Trump was not qualified, not honest and trustworthy and didn’t have the right temperament. A similar pattern existed in Virginia, which Clinton carried by 5 points.

A year later, the main difference between Trump’s 46 percent win of the popular vote, and his current 39 percent job approval in the Real Clear Politics average, are the voters who expressed those doubts last year. Many are self-identified independents who voted reluctantly for him and against Republican candidates this year.

They will be especially important in next year’s Democratic bid to overturn Republican control of the House of Representatives, where the GOP has 23 seats above a majority. Many prime targets are in suburban areas like the ones that voted strongly Democratic last week, including 16 of the 23 districts that voted both for Clinton and a Republican member of Congress. Seven are in California, while others are in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, which all backed Clinton.

Beyond disdain for Trump, however, the principal barrier to strong Democratic 2018 congressional gains remains the sophisticated way Republicans maximized their prospects by drawing favorable district lines after the 2010 census. That produced Republican margins sufficient to control the House in the delegations of just five presidential swing states: Florida, 16-11; Michigan, 9-5; Ohio, 12-4; Pennsylvania, 13-5; and Virginia, 7-4.

Despite this, a strong national Democratic showing akin to this year’s results would probably win both the House and a larger share of the three dozen governorships being contested. (The Senate is another, more complicated, story.)

Such a result would likely reflect the two parties’ current national standing better than Trump’s narrow 2016 margin. Since 1992, Democratic presidential candidates have outpolled Republicans in all but one election—President George W. Bush’s narrow 2004 victory— natural majority whose impact has been minimized by the concentration of Democrats in larger industrial and coastal states. Democrats have also suffered in non-presidential years from reduced turnout, especially among young people and minorities.

That happened to some extent in Virginia, but was more than offset by increased turnout of white college graduates and the fact their 2016 Trump majority became a Democratic one this year.

If Hillary Clinton had been slightly less of a turn-off for those voters, she would have more than offset the president’s gains in less educated, rural areas and spared the country a presidency that is leaving an unfortunate mark in what hopefully will be its single term.