The suburbs also gave Virginia Democrats control of both houses in the state legislature, which means the state's executive branch is under full Democratic control, including the governor's mansion, for the first time in years. Rural areas of the state continued voting Republican, but it wasn't enough, David Montgomery reports for CityLab.
Many pundits and prognosticators are poring over Tuesday's results in an attempt to forecast the 2020 presidential election, but unique or regional circumstances make it difficult to draw clear conclusions. One of the biggest questions is how much President Trump can help Republican candidates elsewhere. The answer is complicated, especially in Kentucky. Trump held a huge campaign rally for Gov. Matt Bevin on Monday, but Bevin, one of the nation's least popular governors, appears to have lost by some 5,000 votes (he hasn't conceded, pending a vote recanvass).
However, Republicans won almost all of the down-ticket state races, many with more votes than Bevin, Politico reports. Traditionally, the top of the ticket gets the most votes and influences the downticket races, but in Kentucky many voted Republican for the downticket races and either abstained from voting for governor or voted for one of Bevin's opponents.
Bevin's long-standing feud with teachers may have influenced the race; teachers were key to Democrat Andy Beshear's get-out-the-vote effort, and many rural Republican teachers reported voting for Beshear, who chose a teacher as his running mate, Moriah Balingit reports for The Washington Post. Bevin's antagonistic comments about educators "lost the support of many Kentuckians," Al Cross told Balingit. Cross is the director of The Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, which publishes The Rural Blog.
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| Most Ky. counties shifted left since the last gubernatorial election. (Washington Post map; click to enlarge it.) |
Bevin's loss doesn't mean Trump will lose Kentucky next year, the Post's Philip Bump writes, noting that Kentucky's voters never supported Bevin (either in 2015 or 2019) as much as they supported Trump in 2016. But Bump also notes that the eastern half of the state shifted heavily leftward in 2019, as compared to the 2015 gubernatorial election. That doesn't mean that Democrats carried most counties; it just means that more voters went blue, even in red counties.
Another big difference between Bevin's first and second gubernatorial runs: his support in 2019 was much more polarized on rural-urban lines than in 2015, and though Bevin apparently lost, the rural-urban split in 2019 looked a lot like the state's split during the presidential election in 2016. Translation: many hardcore rural Trump voters probably showed up for Bevin in 2019, but higher Democratic turnout carried the day, Bump writes.
Bevin's unpopularity makes it difficult to draw conclusions about Trump's utility as a vote-getter in statewide or local races, though Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel tweeted (without evidence) that Trump had boosted Bevin from a 17-point deficit to a near tie and boasted that Republicans had won the other statewide races, John Bennett reports for Roll Call. "This was a case where Republicans and Democrats might be right," GOP strategist Evan Siegfried told Bennett. "Democrats are right that the president wasn’t enough to help Bevin, but Republicans are right that they had a very big night there otherwise."
Though Mississippi went mostly for Republicans for statewide offices this year, the race for governor was much closer than in 2015, despite Trump holding a rally there last week. Attorney General Jim Hood, a Democrat, lost by less than 50,000 votes to current Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves. In 2015, Republican incumbent Phil Bryant (who couldn't run again this year because of term limits) clobbered Democratic challenger Robert Gray by more than 245,000 votes.
However, analysts say Trump "remains an asset to GOP incumbents and candidates in Republican strongholds . . . meaning the Trump brand could be key in driving up turnout in deeply red counties there and in a handful of swing states," Bennett reports.
On that front, Louisiana will be a state to watch. Trump recently held a rally there in support of Republican gubernatorial challenger Eddie Rispone, who will face Democratic incumbent John Bel Edwards in a Nov. 16 runoff election.
from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2CkJuEo Tuesday's elections show increasing rural-suburban polarization; hard to say how Trump affected races - Entrepreneur Generations
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