News Journal:Delaware election shows how Trump is turning suburbs blue

Nationally, the Democratic victory in taking over the House of Representatives with a comfortable governing majority will make a gigantic difference. For the past two years, Congress has virtually ignored the oversight responsibility the Constitution gave it over the Executive branch.
That power will be restored next January.
To what effect? President Trump will no longer exercise unchecked power. The House will no doubt pass legislation (on strengthening the Affordable Care Act and restoring the Voting Rights Act, for example) that will challenge the White House. And yes, there will ultimately be investigations into such things as whether the President has used his office to enrich himself.
For better or worse, we will continue to live in uncommonly interesting times.
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Beyond that, the past few months have reminded me of something I learned quite a few years ago. The kind of campaign a candidate runs nearly always tells you what he or she really believes about where the electorate stands.
A president whose name was not on any ballot dominated this past election. He determined the Election Day message for just about every Republican candidate at all levels, whether they liked it or not. He Insisted, over and over again, that voters should make the election a referendum on Donald J. Trump.
What was extraordinary, given his insistence that the election was all about him, was that he spent so little time talking about his administration’s accomplishments. Remember his United Nations speech just seven weeks ago?
“Today, I stand before the United Nations General Assembly to share the extraordinary progress we’ve made. In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.”
Over and over again, we keep getting reminded that what this president says on any given day has nothing to do what he will do the next. What historic accomplishments did he even mention during the campaign?
His tax cut was proclaimed historic when it was passed, but it hardly ever came up. President Trump can definitely read polls, and he knew it was unpopular
The signature Republican issue of the last three federal elections was healthcare and ending Obamacare. Not this time. Polls indicated Obamacare was more popular than the tax cut.
For many Republicans, deregulation and the administration’s about face on climate control were accomplishments, but we heard virtually nothing about them.
No, what Trump’s campaign turned out to be in the last couple of weeks was the “caravan” — as many as 3,500 men, women and children slowly moving north through Mexico who might eventually seek asylum at our southern border.
If the kind of campaign he ran tells you what Trump really believes about his base, the way he made the caravan an existential threat to the security of the United States makes sense. He believes that fear of the Other is the strongest appeal he can make.
Was he right? Unfortunately, in a few states, it seemed he was.
We are a divided nation, more divided than ever by the rhetoric of our president. But overall, his appeal to fear did not succeed.
Nationally, millions more votes were cast for Democrats than Republicans. Dozens of suburbs that had voted Republican for decades now have new Democratic representatives.
The election here in Delaware was the final step in the decline of the Delaware Republican Party.
In 1972, when I first volunteered in the Biden for Senate campaign, the Republican Party was dominant in Delaware. All the major offices were in Republican hand — governor, senator, member of Congress, even mayor of Wilmington.
In fact, the reason Joe Biden was able to become the Democratic U S Senate nominee was because he had been one of the few winners in the 1970 election, when he had won a seat on the New Castle County Council.
Delaware was one of the most Republican states in the country. In fact, the most Republican region for state House and Senate seats was in the area between Brandywine Hundred and Newark along the border with Pennsylvania.
Last Tuesday, two veteran Republican state legislators, Deborah Hudson and Greg Lavelle, were defeated by newcomers Krista Griffith and Laura Sturgeon. Hudson had been the number-two person in the House, and Lavelle, number two in the Senate.
Delaware is now probably one of the most Democratic states in the country.
Both nationally, and in Delaware the political divide between the concerns of the Republican rural and Democratic urban is more pronounced than ever. But the election demonstrated that the suburbs have definitely moved into the Democratic column, and the demographic changes in our population are inexorable.

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