From the moment Donald Trump first won the presidency eight years ago, suburban voters have led the political backlash against his contentious brand of politics, shedding their traditional Republican leanings and voting against the GOP in ever-growing numbers. It’s an electoral trend Democrats expected to continue in perpetuity.
And then Tuesday arrived.
In one of the biggest surprises of a gut-punch election for Democrats, Kamala Harris suffered broad and significant setbacks against Trump in suburbs across the country, failing to match — much less exceed — Joe Biden’s 2020 vote totals there.
The reversal came despite Democrats’ strongly held belief that the vice president was poised to do better in the suburbs than Biden and that she’d expand the party’s gains thanks primarily to growing support among the mostly white and well-off voters who populate the area.
“It’s a huge surprise,” said Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy, education and politics at the centrist Democratic group Third Way. “We made a play that we were going to counteract his gains with non-college men, with men of color by leaning into the suburbs, by getting those college-educated voters. And it just didn’t work.”
Democrats, Erickson added, might have hit a high-water mark in the suburbs in 2020 aided by the pandemic, raising doubts about whether the party can count on increasing support in the area in future elections.
Democratic strategists say they are only starting to understand why the party performed so poorly in those areas, amid a broader set of questions about why they suffered across-the-board losses with every demographic in every part of the country. But even as party operatives worried ahead of Tuesday about continued losses in rural areas and sinking support among Black and Latino voters, they hardly ever expressed concern that Harris’ support in the suburbs was also in danger.
Tuesday’s results show how misplaced their confidence was.
Exit polls of the race found Harris losing the suburbs by 2 percentage points to Trump, 50% to 48%. Four years ago, exit polls found that Biden had won suburbs nationally by 2 percentage points, 50% to 48%.
In the crucial Philadelphia suburb of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Democrats expected Harris to perform better than Biden, Democrats lost the county for the first time since 1988. Trump squeaked a 0.1 percentage point lead, about a 4-point gain from 2020.
Harris also lost about 3 points of support compared to Biden in the Philadelphia suburb of Montgomery County and the Detroit suburb of Oakland County.
The vice president didn’t backslide that badly in every suburb: In the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha County and in the Charlotte suburb of Cabarrus County, she received slightly more votes than Biden did in 2020.
But in one of the larger suburban backslides, Harris’ margin dipped 8 points in Loudoun County, Virginia — she won by just 16 points compared to Biden’s 24-point victory.
Harris’ performance in Loudoun County was particularly alarming to some Democrats and a sign of just how unexpected this week’s setback was. A suburb of Washington, D.C., in northern Virginia, it was seen during Barack Obama’s presidential runs of 2008 and 2012 as a bellwether for Democratic performance in once-Republican-leaning suburbs. Obama won it by more than 4 percentage points in 2012; four years later, Hillary Clinton won it by 17 points against Trump.
Trump’s first term in office appeared to supercharge the suburban shift away from Republicans, starting with a 2017 special House election in suburban Atlanta that saw Democratic nominee Jon Ossoff nearly win a district that Republicans had won by more than 20 percentage points less than a year earlier. (Ossoff would later bank on growing suburban support to win a Senate seat in Georgia in 2021.)
The pivot in suburban Atlanta toward Democrats was powered by many onetime Republicans, including former supporters of former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Democrats fear that in 2024, however, many of those former Republican voters were turned off by the party’s leftward lurch on some cultural issues.
“When you allow some of your party’s loudest voices who are saying very unpopular things to go largely unrebutted for years, it adds up and allows Republicans to define you on unfavorable terms,” said Jeff Smith, a former Democratic state lawmaker from Missouri, who cited 2020’s calls to “defund the police” as continuing to damage the party.
“If the Democratic Party doesn’t reckon with the ways in which excesses of the activist left have damaged the party’s brand with massive swaths of the country, it’ll be tough to recover,” he added.
Other Democrats expressed concern that the party’s focus on abortion rights didn’t resonate in the suburbs the way the party had hoped. Even if voters wanted more abortion access, Erickson said, some of them might have concluded that there wasn’t much Democrats would do to make that happen.
“We assumed that people thought abortion access equals Democrats, and no abortion access equals Republicans,” she said. “And I don’t think it was that simple.”
Party strategists said that, regardless, the suburbs will be a subject of intense postelection analysis. For now, many of them said they simply don’t know what happened.
“I have no idea what to do next or what went wrong,” one Democratic strategist said. “But something went badly, horribly wrong.”
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Alex Roarty is a reporter at NOTUS. Em Luetkemeyer and Helen Huiskes are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.