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Democrats Win Control in Virginia and Claim Narrow Victory in Kentucky Governor’s Race https://nyti.ms/32mbli5

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Good analysis from the elections across America 🇺🇸 last night. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised with the results, especially in Kentucky. Now we have to focus on beating Mitch McConnell. PLEASE consider following @AmyMcGrathKY.

.@AmyMcGrathKY is next. She’s taking down #MoscowMitch next November.

I’m donating to her today. I hope you will too. https://t.co/deEqvUsN7L

Democrats Win Control in Virginia and Claim Narrow Victory in Kentucky Governor’s Race

Control of Virginia’s government fell to Democrats for the first time in decades, while Andy Beshear held an edge over Gov. Matt Bevin in the Kentucky election.

By Jonathan Martin | Published Nov. 5, 2019 Updated Nov. 6, 2019, 8:49 AM ET | New York Times | Posted Nov. 6, 2019

Democrats won complete control of the Virginia government for the first time in a generation on Tuesday and claimed a narrow victory in the Kentucky governor’s race, as Republicans struggled in suburbs where President Trump is increasingly unpopular.

In capturing both chambers of the legislature in Virginia, Democrats have cleared the way for Gov. Ralph S. Northam, who was nearly driven from office earlier this year, to press for measures tightening access to guns and raising the minimum wage that have been stymied by legislative Republicans.

In Kentucky, Gov. Matt Bevin, a deeply unpopular Republican, refused to concede the election to his Democratic challenger, Attorney General Andy Beshear. With 100 percent of the precincts counted, Mr. Beshear was ahead by 5,100 votes.

Mr. Beshear presented himself as the winner, telling supporters that he expected Mr. Bevin to “honor the election that was held tonight.”

“Tonight, voters in Kentucky sent a message loud and clear for everyone to hear,” Mr. Beshear said. “It’s a message that says our elections don’t have to be about right versus left, they are still about right versus wrong.”

Mr. Bevin asserted to supporters that “there have been more than a few irregularities,” without offering specifics.

Mr. Bevin’s troubles did not appear to be a drag on other Republicans, who captured every other statewide race in Kentucky — a sign that Kentucky voters were rejecting Mr. Bevin and not his party. Daniel Cameron handily won the attorney general’s race, becoming the first African-American to claim the office and the first Republican to do so in over 70 years.

Republicans did manage to capture the governor’s mansion in Mississippi as Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves defeated Attorney General Jim Hood by about five percentage points in an open-seat race that illustrated the enduring conservatism of the Deep South. The final governorship up for grabs in these off-year campaigns is in Louisiana where Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, is facing re-election a week from Saturday.

In New Jersey, a state that seemed to be shifting increasingly blue each year, Republicans were on the cusp of their first legislative gains in nearly a decade. With final results still being tallied late Tuesday, Republicans looked likely to pick up two seats in the Assembly and one in the Senate, powered largely by a surge along the southern part of the state where Mr. Trump won easily in 2016 despite Democrats’ local advantage.

But the news was more ominous for Republicans in Pennsylvania, a critical state for Mr. Trump’s re-election, where Democrats were poised to gain control of local government in a handful of suburban Philadelphia counties that have long been Republican strongholds.

Across the nation Tuesday, a handful of candidates made history. In addition to Mr. Cameron in Kentucky, Ghazala Hashmi, a Democrat, was the first Muslim woman elected to the Virginia Senate, capturing a suburban Richmond district. And in Arizona, Regina Romero was headed toward victory in the Tucson mayor’s race, becoming the first woman and first Latina to lead that city.

In Virginia, where Mr. Northam and two other statewide Democrats were pressured to resign following a series of scandals earlier this year, the party overcame its own self-inflicted challenges by harnessing voter antipathy toward Mr. Trump to win a series of seats. For the first time since 1993, Democrats control both chambers in the legislature and the governor’s office — allowing them to redraw the state’s legislative boundaries after next year’s census.

Linking Republican incumbents to the unpopular president and criticizing them for opposing gun control measures in the aftermath of a mass shooting in Virginia Beach in May, Democratic challengers built their victory with strong showings in suburbs stretching from outside Washington to Richmond and Hampton Roads. In Fairfax County, the state’s largest jurisdiction, the last remaining Republican lawmaker was defeated.

MORE RESULTS

Ky. | Miss. | Va. | N.J. | N.Y. | Me. | Pa. | Colo.

Ten years after Republicans last won a statewide election there, the legislative victories cemented Virginia’s evolution to becoming a reliably blue state.

Mr. Northam, who admitted and then denied wearing blackface as a young man, said Tuesday night that Virginia voters made clear they “want us to defend the rights of women, L.G.B.T.Q. Virginians, immigrant communities and communities of color.” And he vowed to broaden access to health care, improve public schools, combat climate change and pass gun control legislation.

On a day of state and local elections that illustrated the country’s growing polarization, red-state Republicans sought to frame their campaigns as a test of loyalty to Mr. Trump while Democrats in more liberal states tied their opponents to the president.

Coming one year before the presidential election, the races reflected the country’s increasingly contentious politics and the widening rural-urban divide.

Nowhere was that more apparent than in Kentucky, where Mr. Beshear ran far better than national Democrats in the state’s lightly-populated counties but built his advantage thanks in large part to his overwhelming strength in the state’s cities and suburbs.

Mr. Beshear’s performance demonstrated that Mr. Trump’s popularity alone is insufficient for most Republicans, even in one of the most conservative regions in the country. Mr. Bevin and national G.O.P. groups, grasping for ways to overcome Mr. Bevin’s weakness, sought to turn the election into a referendum on Mr. Trump, national policy issues and the Democratic impeachment inquiry.

And the president himself stood alongside Mr. Bevin Monday night in Lexington to argue that, while the combative governor is “a pain in the ass,” his defeat would send “a really bad message” beyond Kentucky’s borders.

But three years after handing the president a 30-point victory, Kentucky’s voters appeared to put their displeasure with the conservative Mr. Bevin, his controversial policies and even more controversial personality, over their partisan preferences.

Mr. Trump sought to avoid responsibility, asserting on Twitter late Tuesday that his rally had helped Mr. Bevin gain “at least 15 points in last days.” In truth, every public and private poll showed a single-digit contest in the final weeks of the race.

While Mr. Beshear’s apparent margin was slim, the result may have caught Mr. Bevin by surprise. In an interview near the end of the race, Mr. Bevin claimed the race was not even competitive and predicted he’d prevail by “6 to 10 percent.”

Mr. Beshear, a 41-year-old moderate whose father preceded Mr. Bevin in the governor’s mansion, sidestepped questions about Mr. Trump and impeachment while keeping his distance from national Democrats. He focused squarely on Mr. Bevin’s efforts to cut Medicaid and overhaul the state’s pension program while drawing attention to the governor’s string of incendiary remarks, including one that suggested striking teachers had left children vulnerable to molestation.

Yet even as he sought to steer a middle path, Mr. Beshear benefited from liberal enthusiasm, running up wide margins in the state’s two largest cities, Louisville and Lexington.

In a characteristically truculent Twitter thread on Tuesday as voting was underway, Mr. Bevin snapped at the “historically challenged national media” for being surprised at the competitiveness of the Kentucky race, pointing out that only four Republicans had been elected governor since the 1920s and that registered Democrats in the state still outnumbered registered Republicans. He did not mention that this partisan registration gap has considerably shrunk in recent years, nor that Mr. Trump romped there three years ago.

The elections Tuesday featured only a handful of statewide and legislative races, but they neatly captured how thoroughly polarized politics has become in the Trump era.

In the three governors’ races, Republican candidates linked themselves to Mr. Trump at every turn, joining him for rallies in their states and assailing their Democratic rivals for their party’s effort to impeach the president.

While Mr. Trump was embraced by Republicans, the Democratic standard-bearers in the races shunned their more liberal presidential contenders and refused to support the impeachment inquiry, not wanting to fuel the G.O.P.’s strategy of making the red-state races a referendum on the president.

Yet in Virginia, the only Southern state Mr. Trump lost, it was Republicans who were distancing themselves from their national party and a president who has alienated the suburban voters they needed to retain control of the state legislature. While the president stayed away from Virginia, just across the Potomac from the White House, every major Democratic presidential hopeful was welcomed with open arms to campaign with the party’s candidates, in a state that has not elected a statewide Republican in a decade.

In all four states, television commercials and campaign mailers were filled with mentions of Mr. Trump (positively and negatively) as well as of national Democratic leaders such as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Bernie Sanders and the so-called Squad of freshman House Democrats (negatively). And the same hot-button issues that have consumed a gridlocked Washington in recent years have also played a central role in races that in the past would have been dominated by talk of taxes, transportation spending and education.

Predictably, it was the Democrats in the red states and Republicans in increasingly blue Virginia who gamely sought to localize the races. Mr. Beshear and Mr. Hood hammered their Republican opponents on their records and issues unique to Kentucky and Mississippi while casting themselves as pragmatists with little allegiance to their national party. Suburban Virginia Republicans focused on their dedication to constituent service, including filling potholes, and trumpeted their willingness to break from party orthodoxy on some issues.

In Kentucky, Mr. Bevin’s inflammatory conduct — he once portrayed striking teachers as accessories to the sexual assault of children — appeared to have persuaded some voters, from both parties, to vote for Mr. Beshear. John Brown, who has worked in heating and air-conditioning for more than 30 years, said that he has wavered between parties over the years. This time, he voted for Mr. Beshear. “I watch the news, and that’s how I vote,” he said.

“He has poor manners,” Mr. Brown, 62, said, adding that he does not care for his hotheaded temperament, which was apparent when Mr. Bevin spoke. “You can tell his blood pressure is rising.”

Rick Rojas and Campbell Robertson contributed reporting from Louisville, Ky., and Nick Corasaniti from Miami.

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A Big Night for Democrats

There’s a theme here.

By David Leonhardt | Published Nov. 6, 2019, 9:41 AM ET | New York Times | Posted November 6, 2019 |

“He’s tried to rip health care away from our families, and he’s cutting public education,” Andy Beshear, Kentucky’s Democratic candidate for governor, said about his Republican opponent Gov. Matt Bevin in a TV ad.

It’s a strategy we’ve seen before from Democrats — namely, in the 2018 midterms: Portray Republican incumbents as extremists who are hurting ordinary families and instead promise common-sense solutions. The strategy has proved highly effective, too. Last night, Beshear evidently pulled off a big upset, beating Bevin in a state that voted for Donald Trump by 30 percentage points. Beshear leads by 5,000 votes, or 0.4 percentage points, in the latest count, and he has claimed victory.

“As it turns out, when the governor slashes social programs in one of the poorest states in America, voters don’t want to re-elect him. Even if the president tells them to,” The Atlantic’s Alex Wagner wrote. It’s a also reminder, Slate’s Jordan Weissmann wrote, that “Obamacare and Medicaid are fairly popular for all their flaws and fixing/expanding them rather than starting from scratch is probably a good national policy pitch.”

Take note, Democratic presidential candidates.

More on the election …

A few other themes from last night’s elections:

Virginia. Democrats flipped both houses of Virginia’s state legislature. They already hold the governor's office, so they now control the state government for the first time since 1993. “Democrats plan to move swiftly to pass tougher gun safety regulations, protections against discrimination for LGBTQ residents, and an increase in the minimum wage,” wrote HuffPost’s Daniel Marans. Amanda Litman of the progressive group Run for Something wrote: “Flipping VA blue didn't happen in one election cycle. It took *years* of investing, organizing, hard work, recruiting great candidates, and losing a little (or a lot) until we finally won big.”

Voting rights. The Virginia and Kentucky results will likely lead to big progress on voting rights. During the campaign, Beshear pledged to issue an executive order restoring voting rights to an estimated 140,000 Kentucky residents with prior criminal convictions, Daniel Nichanian of The Appeal has noted. “That number alone represents about 4 percent of the state’s voting-age population,” Nichanian wrote. In Virginia, lawmakers are likely to go even further, and enact automatic and same-day registration, expand early voting and extend polling hours, as Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos argues.

Ranked-choice voting. I’m a big fan of ranked-choice voting, in which voters list their preferred candidates in order. It allows people to signal their support for a third party without potentially costing a top candidate victory. And voters in New York City yesterday overwhelmingly voted to implement ranked-choice voting for primary and special elections. The result “will serve as a good test case for ranked-choice voting, and it signals growing momentum for this voting reform,” Vox’s Li Zhou wrote. By one count, New York’s decision will triple the number of voters who use ranked-choice voting.

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Is Politics a War of Ideas or of Us Against Them?

The struggle between pro-Trump and anti-Trump forces has researchers — and party strategists — grasping for an answer.

By Thomas B. Edsall, Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality. | Published Nov. 6, 2019 | New York Times | Posted November 6, 2019 |

Is the deepening animosity between Democrats and Republicans based on genuine differences over policy and ideology or is it a form of tribal warfare rooted in an atavistic us-versus-them mentality?

Is American political conflict relatively content-free — emotionally motivated electoral competition — or is it primarily a war of ideas, a matter of feuding visions both of what America is and what it should become?

Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at Brookings, recently put the issue this way in an essay at the National Affairs website: “Here we reach an interesting, if somewhat surreal, question. What if, to some significant extent, the increase in partisanship is not really about anything?”

This debate has both strategic and substantive consequences. If left and right are split mainly because of differences over policy, the chances of achieving compromise and overcoming gridlock are higher than if the two sides believe that their values, their freedom, their right to express themselves, their very identity, are all at stake. It’s easier to bend on principle than to give up a piece of yourself.

The 2020 presidential contest has taken on the attributes, in the words of Michael Anton, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, of a “Flight 93 Election,” an election with potentially devastating consequence for the loser.

If the opposition wins, Anton wrote about the 2016 election — in a view that holds even more true for the 2020 contest — the assault on one’s own values and principles will be worse than any “of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments. Nor is even that the worst. It will be coupled with a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto unseen in the supposedly liberal West.” Anton was writing from the right, but the same apocalyptic fear of the consequences of defeat applies to the left.

The dispute over the nature and origins of partisanship is a major issue within contemporary academic political science, with enormous practical consequences.

“This is probably one of the most debated questions among people who study American political behavior,” Steven Webster, a political scientist at the Washington University in St. Louis, told me.

Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, is a leading scholar of the us-versus-them school, which has come to be known as “affective partisanship.” She sets out her argument in “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity.”

“Group victory is a powerful prize,” Mason writes, “and American partisans have increasingly seen that as more important than the practical matter of governing a nation.”

She goes on:

American partisans today are prone to stereotyping, prejudice, and emotional volatility. Rather than simply disagreeing over policy outcomes, we are increasingly blind to our commonalities, seeing each other only as two teams fighting for a trophy.

Shanto Iyengar, a political scientist at Stanford and a pioneer in the study of affective partisanship, put it this way in response to my email:

There is a growing body of work showing that policy preferences are driven more by partisans’ eagerness to support their party rather than considered analysis of the pros and cons of opposing positions on any given issue.

Iyengar cited a paper by James N. Druckman, Erik Peterson and Rune Slothuus, political scientists at Northwestern, Texas A&M and Aarhus Universities, “How Elite Partisan Polarization Affects Public Opinion Formation,” that found

stark evidence that polarized environments fundamentally change how citizens make decisions. Specifically, polarization intensifies the impact of party endorsements on opinions, decreases the impact of substantive information and, perhaps ironically, stimulates greater confidence in those — less substantively grounded — opinions.

Instead of voters making reasoned policy choices, “party endorsements carry the day,” the authors note, adding that “elite polarization fundamentally changes the manner in which citizens make decisions.”

I asked Druckman by email about the basis for partisanship, and he replied,

the evidence is clear that, over the past twenty years, partisan emotions have splintered such that people feel more attached to their party and more animus toward the other party. A likely effect is that when partisan elites are also separated, policy substance becomes less relevant. So yes, I think it is clear emotions have increased and this has the potential to undermine substance.

Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory, is a leader of the opposing camp. Instead of partisanship propelling ideological and policy decisions, Abramowitz argues that

Policy and ideological differences are the primary drivers of polarization. Democratic and Republican voters today hold far more distinctive views across a wide range of issues than they did in the past. And it is among those Democrats and Republicans who hold views typical for their party, that is liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, that dislike of the opposing party is strongest.

Webster, writing with Abramowitz, argued in a 2017 paper, “The Ideological Foundations of Affective Polarization in the U.S.” that ideology plays the central role in partisanship. Citing American National Election Studies data, Webster and Abramowitz contend that

Opinions on social welfare issues have become increasingly consistent and divided along party lines and social welfare ideology is now strongly related to feelings about the opposing party and its leaders.” In addition, Webster and Abramowitz tell us, survey experiments demonstrate “that ideological distance strongly influences feelings toward opposing party candidates and the party as a whole.

In an email, Peterson cited further evidence supporting the importance of policy and ideological conviction. “There is a substantial component of partisanship that reflects sincerely held issue opinions,” Peterson wrote, pointing out that

when I’ve asked partisans to evaluate hypothetical co-partisan politicians who do not toe the party line on highly salient issues (e.g., Obamacare repeal, assault weapon bans), they are substantially less supportive of candidates who they disagree with on these core issues.

In other words, partisans’ beliefs trumped their loyalty to party. Similarly, Peterson wrote,

on salient issues (e.g., abortion, the appropriate threshold for the minimum wage), partisans are also more than willing to disapprove of policy proposals that come from a co-partisan when they disagree with the content of the policy.

These patterns, Peterson stressed, “are not something that would be expected if partisanship swamped all other considerations.”

At the same time, however, there is intriguing evidence pointing to the malleability of voters’ views on key issues in response to partisan pressure — evidence, in other words, that voters are willing to change their stance in order to conform to the views of fellow partisans.

In a March 2019 study, “White People’s Racial Attitudes Are Changing to Match Partisanship,” Andrew Engelhardt, a political scientist at Brown, explored changing views among whites from 2016 to 2018, based on surveys conducted by American National Election Studies. Tracking a measure of white views of black Americans, he found that there has been:

A profound shift in whites’ evaluations of black Americans in just a two-year period. The modal white Democrat moves from placing at the scale’s midpoint in 2016 to locating at the scale’s minimum (least racially resentful) in 2018. For Republicans, the modal respondent still places at the scale’s maximum (most resentful), but the percentage of white Republicans here increases from 14 percent to 21 percent. While these shifts may seem small given the scale, I show below they represent a rather substantial change on a measure that has otherwise evolved quite slowly since the 1980s.

On a separate American National Election Studies thermometer measure of group favorability, where 0 is very unfavorable and 100 is very favorable, Engelhardt reported that:

In 2018 Democrats rated black people at a 77, up 7 points from 2016. But they rated whites at a 70, a 2 point decrease. Republicans’ feelings about black people improved slightly (64 vs. 69) in these two years but this was far outpaced by increased warmth toward white people (74 vs. 81). While Republicans consistently feel more positively about white people than black people, white Democrats’ attitudes look quite different. White Democrats now feel more warmly toward black people than white people.

Engelhardt’s findings lend support to the views of Alexander Theodoridis, a political scientist at the University of California-Merced, who contended in an email that

For most people, party identity appears to be far more central and salient than particular issue positions. We see increasing evidence of people adjusting their issue positions or priorities to fit their party allegiance, more than the reverse. We are very good at rationalizing away cognitive dissonance. More important than this chicken-or-egg question is the reality that ideology and party have become very highly sorted today. Liberal and Conservative are now tantamount to Democrat and Republican, respectively. That was not always the case. Furthermore, all sorts of descriptive and dispositional features (ranging from religion and race to personality type and worldview) are also more correlated with political party than they were in the past. All this heightens the us-versus-them nature of modern hyperpolarization.

This debate is sometimes framed in either-or terms, but the argument is less a matter of direct conflict and more a matter of emphasis and nuance.

Yphtach Lelkes, a professor of political communication at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote me that “ideology and partisanship are very hard, and likely impossible, to disentangle,” but, he argued, the larger pattern appears to be that

while both seem to be occurring, ideology driving partisanship only seems to be occurring among those that are most aware of politics, while partisanship driving ideology seems to be happening among everyone.

Similarly, Leonie Huddy, a political scientist at SUNY-Stony Brook, wrote me that the debate “is more complicated than simple tribalism versus consistent ideology.”

There is “clear evidence of partisan tribalism,” Huddy observed, “especially when it comes to a potential win or loss on matters such as impeachment, presidential elections, and policy issues central to electoral victory or defeat,” but at the same time

Democrats and Republicans have become increasingly divided on social, moral, and group-linked issues and are less likely to follow the party on these matters.” She pointed out that the tribal loyalty of many Republican voters would be pushed beyond the breaking point if the party abandoned its opposition to abortion, just as it is “difficult to imagine feminist women continuing to support the Democratic Party if it abandoned its pro-choice position on abortion.

While both sides in the debate over “affective” versus “ideological” partisanship marshal reams of survey data in support of their positions — often data from the same surveys — one thing both sides are in full agreement on is that partisan hostility has reached new heights. This is reflected in two recent papers, one by Abramowitz and Webster, “Negative Partisanship: Why Americans Dislike Parties But Behave Like Rabid Partisans” and one by Nathan Kalmoe, a political scientist at Louisiana State, and Lilliana Mason, “Lethal Mass Partisanship.”

Negative partisanship — based on animosity toward the opposition party, not love of your own — turns out to be one of the crucial factors in the outcome of recent elections and it will almost certainly be a key factor going into the next election.

An astute Democratic strategist, who did not have authorization to speak on the record, sent me calculations from the 2016 and 2018 elections showing that the overwhelming majority of voters hold the opposition party in contempt. They are immovable, in his opinion, and impossible to convert: “We’re seeing anti-party sorting — an increasing number of voters are rejecting at least one of the parties, and they are doing so more strenuously,” he said by email. There are, he continued, more voters who

have a very negative opinion of just one party (87 percent) than identify with one of the parties (67 percent). So, negative partisanship explains the behavior of many more voters.

In addition, “negative partisans vote more consistently against the opposite party than partisans vote for their party.”

The remaining “persuadables” — an estimated 13 percent of voters, with little or no partisan commitment — will play a central role in determining the outcome in 2020.

My source cited polling data from a “consortium of Democratic groups” showing that in 2016 the small fraction of the electorate made up of persuadables voted for Trump 41-36, but in 2018 they voted for Democratic House candidates 57-41. At the moment, he said, polling shows that these swing voters currently prefer a generic Democrat to Trump 54-28, with 19 percent undecided.

I asked the strategist how he expects this volatile group to make up its collective mind in 2020. His answer should not provide comfort to anti-Trump partisans:

Your question is among the most urgent ones facing Democratic strategists. There won’t be a single answer — that group is not a monolith, and who the Democratic nominee is will make a difference. That said, we’re not there yet. Unfortunately, too many Democratic strategists with the most money to spend are still using content development practices that don’t match what we know about those voters.

At the moment, he said, “no one — including political commentators — has evidence-based answers to your question of what will move this group (or any other definition of ‘swing’ voters).”

In other words, in an unpredictable world of intensifying partisanship and rancor, Democratic strategists — and Republican strategists too — are pretty much flying blind.

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Analysis: Trump's GOP has no answer for suburban slide

By STEVE PEOPLES | Published November 6, 2019 10:00 AM ET | AP | Posted November 6, 2019

NEW YORK (AP) — The suburban revolt against President Donald Trump's Republican Party is growing.

And if nothing else, the GOP's struggle across the South on Tuesday revealed that Republicans don't have a plan to fix it.

In Kentucky, Trump and his allies went all in to rescue embattled Gov. Matt Bevin, who literally wrapped himself in the president's image in his pugnacious campaign. In Virginia, embattled Republicans ran away from Trump, downplaying their support for his policies and encouraging him to stay away.

In the end, neither strategy was a sure winner.

Bevin's race remained too close to call on Wednesday, locked in a virtual dead heat with Democrat Andy Beshear in a state Trump won by nearly 30 percentage points in 2016. The GOP in Virginia lost control of both houses of the legislature for the first time in a generation.

It's difficult to draw sweeping conclusions from state elections, each with their own unique quirks and personalities. But there's little doubt Tuesday's outcome is a warning to Republicans across the nation a year out from the 2020 election and a year after the 2018 midterms: The suburbs are still moving in the wrong direction.

"Republican support in the suburbs has basically collapsed under Trump," Republican strategist Alex Conant said. "Somehow, we need to find a way to regain our suburban support over the next year."

The stakes are undoubtably high. While neither Virginia nor Kentucky is likely to be a critical battleground in the presidential race next year, Tuesday's results confirm a pattern repeated across critical swing states — outside of Philadelphia, Detroit and Charlotte, North Carolina. They're also sure to rattle Republican members of Congress searching for a path to victory through rapidly shifting territory.

To be sure, Republicans demonstrated their firm grip on rural areas, and turnout for both sides appeared to be healthy for off-year elections. Notably, Kentucky's voters elected Republicans to a handful of other statewide offices. In Mississippi, another Trump stronghold, Republicans kept their hold on the governor's office, as Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves defended well-funded Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood.

But the GOP's challenge was laid bare in lower-profile elections across the nation on Tuesday.

Just outside Philadelphia, Democrats said they took control of the Delaware County's five-member council for the first time since the Civil War. In nearby Chester County, Democrats beat two Republican incumbents on the board of commissioners to seize the majority for the first time ever.

The same shifts defined state legislative races across Virginia's suburbs, particularly in places like Henrico County just outside Richmond.

Republican state Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant won there by almost 20 percentage points four years ago. The area has recently been transformed by an influx of younger, college-educated voters and minorities, a combination that's become a recipe for Democrats' support.

As the final votes were being tallied, Dunnavant was leading by less than 3 points against Democrat Debra Rodman, a college professor who seized on Trump and her Republican opponent's opposition to gun control to appeal to moderate voters.

In northern Virginia, Democrat John Bell flipped a state Senate district from red to blue in a district that has traditionally favored Republicans. The race, set in the rapidly growing and diverse counties outside of Washington, D.C., attracted nearly $2 million in political advertising.

Democrats' surging strength in the suburbs reflects the anxiety Trump provokes among moderates, particularly women, who have rejected his scorched-earth politics and uncompromising conservative policies on health care, education and gun violence.

Republicans' response in Virginia was to try to stay focused on local issues. In the election's final days, Dunnavant encouraged Trump to stay out of the state. The president obliged, sending Vice President Mike Pence instead.

Struggling for a unifying message, some Republicans turned to impeachment, trying to tie local Democrats to their counterparts in Washington and the effort to impeach Trump.

No one played that card harder than Kentucky's Bevin, who campaigned aside an "impeachment" banner and stood next to Trump on the eve of the election.

But even in ruby-red Kentucky, Trump was not a cure-all and the trouble in the suburbs emerged.

Bevin struggled in Republican strongholds across the northern part of the state, where the Democrats' drift and increased enthusiasm was clear.

In 2015, Bevin won Campbell County south of Cincinnati handily. On Tuesday, Beshear not only carried the county with ease, he nearly doubled the number of Democratic votes there, compared to the Democratic nominee of four years ago. Beshear also found another 74,000 Democratic votes in urban Jefferson County, home of Louisville.

Beshear led Bevin by the narrowest of margins Tuesday night.

Republicans were quick to blame Bevin for his stumbles. The governor was distinctly unpopular and picked fights with powerful interests in the state. Still, it was difficult for Republicans not to note the warning signs for the party next year and beyond.

"They continue to lose needed support in suburban districts, especially among women and college-educated voters," said Republican strategist Rick Tyler. "That trend, if not reversed, is a death spiral."

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