Emily Romney Sanchez, a lifelong conservative, said she can’t vote Republican while President Trump is in office.
(Caitlin O’Hara / For The Times)
The orderly subdivisions and kid-friendly communities that ring the nation’s cities have become a deathtrap for Republicans, as college-educated and upper-income women flee the party in droves, costing the GOP its House majority and sapping the party’s strength in state capitals and local governments nationwide.
The dramatic shift is also reshaping the 2020 presidential race, elevating Democratic hopes in traditional GOP strongholds like Arizona and Georgia, and forcing Trump to redouble efforts to boost rural turnout to offset defectors who, some fear, may never vote Republican so long as the president is on the ballot.
The GOP has “gone from defending conservative principles” like free trade and a muscular stance against Russia and North Korea “to defending [Trump’s] latest Tweets,” said Sanchez, a life coach and mother of five in this prosperous desert community. (She is a distant relative of Republican Utah Sen. Mitt Romney.)
Sanchez considers Trump “reprehensible as a human being” and the Republican Party morally bankrupt. “I couldn’t be a part of it anymore,” she said, and as a result, at age 40 the newly registered independent is weighing her first-ever Democratic vote for president.
The sentiment extended down ballot as well. Outside Philadelphia, Democrats took control in Delaware County for the first time since the Civil War. In suburban Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., the party won every state House seat in Fairfax County, a shift nearly on a par with the 2018 Democratic sweep of congressional seats in Orange County.
“It’s amazing the change, in just the last few years,” said Q. Whitfield Ayres, a pollster who has spent decades strategizing for Republican campaigns and causes. “It’s not any one place. It’s everywhere.”
Navy Vet
Article URL : https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-11-29/2020-battleground-suburban-women-voters