The combination produced some astounding results in Kentucky. Beshear won the state’s two largest counties—Jefferson (which includes Louisville) and Fayette (which includes Lexington)—by a combined 135,000 votes, according to preliminary results. That was nearly triple the total vote advantage that Jack Conway, the Democrats’ 2015 nominee against Bevin, generated in those two counties. Beshear in fact won almost exactly as many votes as Hillary Clinton did in Jefferson County and slightly more than she did in Fayette—an incredible achievement given how much lower turnout usually is for a governor’s race in an off year. “That’s insane. It is incredible. It cannot be stressed enough,” says Rachel Bitecofer, a political scientist at Christopher Newport University, in Virginia.
The legislative elections in Virginia show the same pattern of the suburban erosion for the GOP in the Trump era. Democrats overthrew narrow Republican majorities in both chambers of the General Assembly by capturing at least five state House seats (while leading narrowly in a sixth) and two in the state Senate. They included seats in the Washington, D.C., suburbs of Northern Virginia and near the state capital of Richmond. For the first time in 50 years, Democrats now control all of the state House seats in Fairfax County, which is near Washington, D.C.
But those new gains were probably less telling than what didn’t change: Democrats didn’t lose any of the previously Republican seats that they captured in suburban areas—particularly Northern Virginia and Richmond—in their landslide win in the state in 2017, which foreshadowed Democrats’ gains in the 2018 midterms. “The key is, the Republicans didn’t win back any of the suburban seats they lost,” Davis said. “Basically the mold in those areas hardened. We were like, ‘Oh it was temporary—a one-time turnout [surge].’ But they didn’t win them back.”
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