Democrats Were Both Lucky and Good in the Off-Year Elections
But what can we take out of 2019? While it is true that state elections are not fought on the same issue terrain as federal races, we are seeing an increased nationalization of American politics. The hyper-partisanship and tribalism that started in federal contests has now reached into state and, in some cases, even local races.
There is very little in the way of election results this year or polling data, national or state-level, that should give Republicans much encouragement. While it’s more than a little dishonest to blame Trump for the GOP losses in Kentucky or Louisiana, the fact is he went in and put a lot on the line. He visited Louisiana three times and Kentucky once in the closing weeks of the campaigns, practically begging those attending his rallies to vote Republican for his sake if no other. It didn’t work.
Those suburbs were disaster areas for the GOP in 2018, and they didn’t look any better in 2019. Just a quick look at the northern Kentucky suburbs, near Cincinnati, shows they did not perform for the GOP the way they should have. In Louisiana, Jefferson Parish, just outside New Orleans, is one big suburb, essentially the birthplace of the Republican Party of Louisiana. Edwards won 57 percent of the vote there.
The reality is that the most convincing wins for Democrats were in lower-level offices that didn’t have the extenuating circumstances of Kentucky and Louisiana. In Virginia, a once-red state that trended purple for the last decade and is now starting to turn blue, Democrats captured both the House of Delegates and the Senate, along with the governorship. That’s the Virginia trifecta, and that’s with redistricting coming in two years.
Democrats gained control in the November elections of the suburban Philadelphia county councils in Bucks, Chester, and Delaware Counties. In the case of Delaware County, Republicans have held it since the Civil War; Democrats picked up two seats on the five-member council in 2017, then won the other three this year, a sweep in the county that long-featured the last urban Republican political machine in the country.
You can explain away some of these results, but not all of them.
https://cookpolitical.com/analysis/national/national-politics/democrats-were-both-lucky-and-good-year-elections