Momentous and tragic events are driving public attention back toward abortion rights and gun control, two issues that keyed the Democratic advance in well-educated suburbs over the past generation. And that could create the Democrats’ best chance of defending those gains in the stormy environment of the 2022 midterm elections.
Debates over abortion and guns have played a central role in the ongoing geographic resorting of the two predominant political parties. Since the early years of this century, Republicans have consolidated a commanding grip on rural and small-town communities filled with culturally conservative blue-collar voters who generally oppose both legal abortion and most restrictions on gun ownership.
In mirror image, Democrats have gained in white-collar communities around major cities filled with well-educated voters who generally support both abortion rights and gun control — a process that peaked with the sweeping suburban gains that powered the party’s recapture of the US House in 2018.
Amid discontent over persistent Covid disruptions, dissatisfaction over President Joe Biden’s performance, supply chain problems like the shortage of infant formula, and above all, the highest inflation in 40 years, Republicans have expressed mounting confidence about recapturing many of those suburban House seats, and flipping suburban voters in Senate and governor races, in November. But the tragic mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, have riveted attention on gun violence and access to firearms, even as the leaking of a draft opinion from five GOP-appointed justices has raised the prospect that the Supreme Court, just weeks from now, might repeal the constitutional right to abortion established under the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.
No serious analyst in either party expects more focus on these issues to erase all the advantages Republicans are stockpiling in the midterm elections. But the more those issues influence voters’ decisions, operatives on both sides of the debate agree, the better Democrats’ chances to blunt the GOP advance, at least in white-collar and suburban communities.
“Refocusing on gun safety and abortion rights will move many of these 2018 suburban districts away from the Republicans and make their playing field smaller,” predicts Peter Ambler, executive director of Giffords, the gun safety advocacy group founded by former Rep. Gabby Giffords.
Many Republicans agree they could face more resistance in suburbia if abortion rights and gun control remain prominent concerns through Election Day. John Thomas, a Texas-based GOP consultant who has worked extensively in California suburbs such as Orange County, says that until these issues resurfaced so prominently, the Republican path in these areas appeared clear, with voters less focused on their distaste for former President Donald Trump and more on their dissatisfaction with Biden.
“Two months ago, we would have absolutely waltzed through these places with college-educated suburban White women, because they had no real reason to either break against us or turn out,” he says. “There’s no orange man [Trump] — there was no wedge issue for them.”
Like most Republicans, and even some Democrats, Thomas believes that discontent over inflation and disenchantment over Biden will remain the driving factor in white-collar districts, just as in less affluent places. But, he says, the renewed attention to abortion and gun control has added an element of uncertainty and created an opening for Democrats to change the electoral dynamic in some areas.
“It comes down to what is the national conversation and top issue as we go to November,” Thomas says. “Is it economic driven and a referendum on Biden’s failure? Quite frankly, if those other issues [gun control and abortion] are in the world of parity, Republicans have problems in those seats.”
Democrats’ suburban advance
Improved performance in well-educated suburbs (along with society’s increasing racial diversity and the growth of millennials and Generation Z in the electorate) has been among the most significant drivers of Democratic electoral gains over the past quarter century. The Democrats’ suburban advance has reflected the increasing prominence of cultural affinities in shaping electoral choices, with the party gaining among voters who often took center-right positions on economic issues like taxes but leaned left on cultural questions such as abortion, gun control and LGBTQ rights. (That process, in reverse, fueled the GOP small-town and rural gains among culturally conservative voters who once backed Democrats supporting expansive government programs such as Social Security.)
Through the 1990s, House Republicans representing suburban constituencies often voted for gun control and/or expressed support for legalized abortion: When the House in 1993 passed the “Brady Bill” establishing the national background check system for purchases from gun stores, 54 House Republicans, mostly representing suburban areas, voted for it. But since then, almost all elected Republicans, whatever their constituencies, have moved toward lockstep opposition to legal abortion and gun control.
Against the backdrop of widespread white-collar discontent with Trump, Democrats exploited that mismatch more effectively than ever in 2018, when they ousted Republicans from suburban districts around major cities from coast to coast. In that election, Republicans tumbled from holding about 43% of all the House districts with more college graduates than average to only about 25% of them, according to a AWN analysis at the time. The Giffords group calculated that 40 House Republicans with high ratings from the National Rifle Association lost or retired that year. Two years later, those same suburban places provided decisive votes for Biden.
But these suburban areas haven’t been immune to the general discontent over the country’s direction and Biden’s performance that has generated such a powerful tailwind for Republicans in the 2022 elections. Biden’s approval with college-educated White voters remains much higher than his standing among Whites without such degrees. But compared with his 2020 vote he has fallen substantially with well-educated voters as well, especially men.
Amid that discontent, Republicans have been extremely optimistic about regaining ground with suburban voters in the critical statewide races for governor (including in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Texas, Arizona and Nevada) and the Senate (including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.)
“These areas had been moving more Democrat,” says former National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Davis, who represented a suburban Northern Virginia seat in the US House. “What you see now are the Democrats in charge, and to the average person the economy is not being managed [well], and so I think it’s going to snap back to some extent.”
Because suburban seats fueled the Democratic takeover of the House, they are especially central to Republican hopes of winning back the chamber. In 2020, Republicans recaptured many of the Democratic 2018 pickups in districts where Trump remained popular. That’s left Democrats mostly defending seats this fall in metropolitan areas that didn’t like Trump but have now soured on Biden — a list that includes the districts held by Reps. Elaine Luria and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, Angie Craig in Minnesota, Cindy Axne in Iowa, Greg Stanton in Arizona, Susie Lee in Nevada, Kim Schrier in Washington state, and Mike Levin and Katie Porter in California. The suburbs are “where we are either going to stem losses or hold our ground,” says Democratic pollster Molly Murphy.
Attitudes about guns and abortion may represent Democrats’ best chance in these places. Public polling shows that large majorities of college-educated voters side with Democratic views on both issues. Nearly 70% of college-educated adults, for instance, said they opposed overturning Roe v. Wade in a nationwide AWN poll conducted by SSRS in May. Among college-educated adults, nearly 9 in 10 supported universal background checks for gun purchases, and more than 7 in 10 backed a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines in a nationwide Pew Research Center poll last year, according to detailed results provided to AWN by Pew. Nearly 9 in 10 college graduates also opposed a policy proliferating in Republican-controlled states: allowing people to carry concealed weapons without permits in public places.
State polls underline that message. In California, a state with multiple competitive US House races, 69% of college-educated adults said they were more likely to vote for a candidate who supported maintaining Roe, compared with just 12% who said they wanted a candidate committed to overturning it, according to a recent Public Policy Institute of California survey. Even in Texas, University of Texas/Texas Tribune polls have found that nearly 6 in 10 residents with college degrees oppose both the complete ban on abortion that will snap into effect there this summer if the Supreme Court overturns Roe and the 2021 state law allowing permitless carry of firearms.