美国国家公共电台 NPR Democrats Won The Suburbs. Now They Have To Hold Them

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Democrats² may end up flipping³ 40 House seats this year. Many of that party's wins in the midterms were in the suburbs. Districts around Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston and Oklahoma City all went blue. So how's that going to translate in the future? NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben traveled to Atlanta to try to find out.

JANE RUSSELL: I'm in all the groups, though. We do both...

REBECCA SANDBERG: Yeah, a lot of us are in all of the groups.

RUSSELL: ...Multiple groups. Right, it...

DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE⁴: Rebecca Sandberg and Jane Russell are politically active - maybe hyperactive. Sandberg counts at least five local political groups that she's involved in. But this fall, at a bar in Roswell, Ga., she and some parents from her kid's school decided⁵ to do even more.

SANDBERG: We had been meeting here on Sunday sometimes for bloody⁶ marys because, by the way, they have great bloody marys here. And we decided one Sunday to add postcards to that. So we wrote postcards for a lot of local candidates that were running.

KURTZLEBEN: Activists⁸ like Sandberg helped propel Democrat¹ Lucy McBath to a win in Georgia's 6th Congressional District this year. That's a big victory for Democrats in a seat that as recently as 2016 elected a Republican by 23 points.

SANDBERG: The fact that we turned it in two years is pretty amazing.

KURTZLEBEN: Democrats like Sandberg already have a new question. Can their party keep all of these suburban⁹ seats it just won? David Wasserman is a political analyst¹⁰ at the Cook Political Report.

DAVID WASSERMAN: Those are going to be the first districts that Republicans pursue in their bid to win the majority.

KURTZLEBEN: That said, a few factors could work in Democrats' favor. Demographics is a big one.

WASSERMAN: Those districts could be much better for Democrats two years from now than they are today because the old Republican base in those districts is, for lack of a better term, dying out.

KURTZLEBEN: Georgia 6, for example, is rapidly becoming more diverse. And for McBath, who is herself African-American, one big focus was energizing¹¹ nonwhite voters. Alabama Democratic Representative Terri Sewell campaigned for her.

TERRI SEWELL: I think that Lucy was really effective in engaging communities that were not - had not been engaged before. You know, women voters as well as minority voters - she really concentrated on that, and that really made a difference.

KURTZLEBEN: Race is just one demographic challenge Republicans face. For years, Democrats have also steadily¹² been doing better with college-educated voters who are concentrated in many suburbs. There's something else that's harder to measure. Democrats here talk about how they hid their beliefs before 2016. Now they've banded together. Jen Cox is founder¹³ of the local women's activist⁷ group PaveItBlue.

JEN COX: A lot of people didn't have it on their radar¹⁴ that they could be this involved in the process, and now there's no turning back from that. They've switched out their social life for their activist life.

KURTZLEBEN: But hold on. Until recently, Republicans routinely won this seat by huge margins¹⁵. They also eked¹⁶ out a special election win in 2017. In short, this year's midterms don't mean Democrats will have an easy path in Georgia 6 or in other suburbs. Jesse Hunt, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, says he's bullish on the GOP's future here. But he acknowledges they have work to do on how to appeal to more suburban voters.

JESSE HUNT: Those are the conversations that we're going to have among party leaders, grassroots activists over the next couple months as we, you know, begin to mount our comeback.

KURTZLEBEN: Local Republicans have some prescriptions¹⁷. Jason Shepherd is chair of the Cobb County Republican Party.

JASON SHEPHERD: We heard very little of how great the economy is. We heard very little about how the tax cuts are working. We misplaced those pocketbook issues that really are what voters in the suburbs in more urban areas care about most.

KURTZLEBEN: That message was lost, he said, when President Trump¹⁸ so heavily emphasized immigration. In this part of the state, more Republicans chose Marco Rubio than Donald Trump in the 2016 primary. Michael Williams, head of the Cobb County Young Republicans, says it's important to confront that moving forward.

MICHAEL WILLIAMS: If we're not dealing¹⁹ with Donald Trump Republicans here, then we need to be able to articulate where we are also not Donald Trump Republicans. Where do we part with the president, and where do we stand with him?

KURTZLEBEN: For all the strategizing people like Williams do on the local level, national trends can dominate. For example, in a midterm year like 2018, the president's party tends to fare poorly.

WILLIAMS: We can knock our knuckles²⁰ raw on doors. We can be making thousands and thousands of phone calls. And then stuff that happens in D.C. at the national level filters down and affects what happens around here, and there's nothing we can really do about it. So 2020 is going to be a whole different ball game.

KURTZLEBEN: And whether or not President Trump says he was on the ballot²¹ this year, he will be next time. Danielle Kurtzleben, NPR News.