I’m not sure whether he’s channeling John Hood, but David Bahnsen’s column at National Review Online echoes the John Locke Foundation chairman’s comments about the importance of suburban voters.
Republicans are right to state that President Trump secured working-class voters whom prior Republican candidates had not. They are also right to conclude that this demographic provided the slight mathematical edge he needed to win the White House. They are not right, however, to imply that this tells the whole story. Hillary Clinton was a deeply unpopular candidate, untrusted, unliked, and most of all, uninspiring. All of Trump’s success with blue-collar white voters would have been for naught if Clinton had just been able to up turnout ever so slightly. There are Obama voters who migrated to Trump, but there is no evidence more compelling than the Obama voter who simply didn’t vote. Hillary Clinton made Donald Trump president. …
… Republicans were spared an even rougher [2018] Election Night by the fact that many of their losses took another week to become official, and by the aforementioned Senate wins. But Republicans still lost seven governorships, somewhere between 35 and 40 House seats, and two purple-state Senate seats (Arizona and Nevada). And those losses were entirely due to the alienation of one critical demographic: Suburban Republicans and Independents who are repulsed by the style of Donald J. Trump.