WASHINGTON – President Trump did defy history in the 2018 midterm elections. While his predecessor, Barack Obama, lost 63 House seats and six Senate seats in his first midterms, Trump held the GOP’s House losses to just over half of that and bolstered the GOP majority in the Senate.
But there are also warning signs in the results that Trump should not ignore. While the working-class voters Trump won in 2016 turned out in droves on Election Day, Republicans were decimated in higher-income suburban Republican districts – including many that voted solidly for Mitt Romney in 2012.
These losses are self-inflicted wounds. The economy is booming: Under Trump’s leadership, economic growth in the second quarter was 4.2 percent, and the unemployment rate has reached 3.7 percent – a nearly 50-year low. Yet Trump’s approval rating on the eve of the 2018 election was 39 percent, the worst for any president since before Dwight Eisenhower. By contrast, Obama had 46 percent approval before his first midterms, at a time when unemployment was soaring at almost 10 percent.
The problem is that Trump has failed to do what every successful two-term president has done before him: expand his base of support. Instead of trying to win over persuadable Americans and bring them into his coalition, the president has sought to energize his base in ways that drive those persuadable voters – particularly suburban women – away.
If he wants to win reelection, Trump needs to bring suburban Republican voters back into the GOP fold. In 2016 he won the suburbs by five points. This gave him the margin of victory in key swing states: In Pennsylvania, he took the overwhelming majority of the state’s rural areas and small towns, while Hillary Clinton won the urban areas around Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. But, as a Post analysis explained, “What made the difference in the end was a Republican shift across much of the state’s suburbs” which “was large enough to carry Trump to a statewide victory of less than one percentage point.” It was a similar story in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina and Florida. If Trump wants a second term, he needs to win those suburban GOP voters back.