Secret Weapon

Democrats’ Secret Weapon: Romney Voters

Stop fetishizing the Obama-Trump converts. If you want to see the future of politics, here’s who Dems need to understand.

By JESSE FERGUSON

The Beltway has a fetish.

Open almost any major newspaper in almost any week, and you’ll find a story set in a working-class community, opening with a vignette from a local diner or a failing factory. These stories wax nostalgic about Obama-Trump voters: those Americans who backed President Barack Obama in 2012 but supported Donald Trump in 2016. In the analysis, they are almost invariably oversimplified as white, working class and lacking a college education. And this same conversation also dominates discussion among top Democratic Party operatives, pollsters and some elected officials.

This focus isn’t exactly wrong: Yes, Democrats lost those voters in 2016, bigly. It’s one of the many reasons Hillary Clinton lost the White House (disclosure: I worked on her campaign). And yes, the future of the Democratic Party does depend, at least in part, on figuring out how to win some of them back. But the tunnel-vision focus on these Obama-Trump voters as the only path forward for the Democratic Party ignores a major opportunity. In the six months since the election, we’ve obsessed about Obama-Trump voters but completely ignored their inverse: the Romney-Clinton voters.

Who are they? Romney-Clinton voters are, generally speaking, college-educated suburban professionals: lawyers, doctors and businesspeople. They voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, but switched to Hillary Clinton in 2016. They abhor xenophobia, the alt-right and racists, but they also mostly socialize within their own race and they’re mostly white. They’re socially liberal but not obsessed with a political agenda. They value fiscal responsibility but also believe in investing in the future, especially education. They remain deeply worried about Trump’s qualifications, scared about his temperament and alienated by his misogyny and ties to extremists. For the first time in a long time, they’re willing to hear about and vote for Democrats.

For journalists and political operatives, these people are harder to romanticize. They lack the stirring, deeply ingrained Americana imagery of the Appalachian coal miner or the Rust Belt autoworker—a news story set against the backdrop of a paralegal’s research library or a suburban office park simply doesn’t feel as compelling.

But if you want to see the future of the Democratic Party—and if you want to understand how Democrats can win back a congressional majority—then it’s important that you pay attention to a group of voters who might cut a less evocative image than their Obama-Trump counterparts, but whose support of Democrats could cause the GOP to collapse.

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You may be asking: Why should we focus on Romney-Clinton voters, since their support ultimately did not win Hillary Clinton the White House? It’s a fair question, and the answer is simple.

First, it’s important to remember that while Trump carried the Electoral College, nearly 3 million more Americans voted for Clinton—she earned more votes than any presidential candidate in history except Obama. If we accept the fact that there were a number of voters who supported both Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016—and that their shift from one party’s candidate to the other to the other was decisive in tipping the Electoral College—then where did Clinton make up the difference to win the popular vote?

According to exit polls, 52 percent of white women voted for Trump in 2016, while four years earlier, 56 percent voted for Romney. Among college graduates, just 42 percent supported Trump; in 2012, 48 percent of college graduates supported Romney. The education gap among whites was especially revealing: 67 percent of whites without a college degree supported Trump, a 14-point jump from Romney in 2012; 45 percent of whites with a college degree voted for Clinton, a 10-point increase over Obama in 2012. In fact, prior to the closing month of the campaign—which was dominated by the slow-rolling release of the exploits of Russia’s hacking and culminated with FBI Director James Comey’s now-infamous letter to Congress about the discovery of new emails in the Clinton case—both internal and public polling showed an even greater crossover vote, suggesting that these voters are even more open to Democrats than we saw on Election Day.

This poses deep risks for Republicans because these voters have long been a key cohort of the GOP’s electoral coalition. Studies show that upper-income and highly educated Americans are substantially more likely to cast ballots, potentially posing a decisive factor in the upcoming midterm elections. And it just so happens that the Romney-Clinton vote centered in areas of the country that are turning bluer—mainly places with large suburban populations and strong economies—where major congressional, senatorial and gubernatorial races will be held in 2017 and 2018.

In Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Texas and Virginia, Clinton had stronger margins in 2016 than Obama in 2012, thanks in large part to suburban Romney-Clinton voters. Even in Pennsylvania, which Clinton ultimately lost, she outperformed Obama in the suburban Philadelphia area that is a critical battleground in the fight for control of the House. In dark-blue California, Romney-Clinton voters increased the Democratic margin of victory by 7 points, foretelling potential danger for several congressional Republicans in 2018 (the Cook Political Report currently lists six GOP-held California seats as either tossups or weakly leaning Republican). Throughout the country, Clinton won key communities that have historically been written off by Democrats as too conservative—places like California’s Orange County, Utah’s Salt Lake County, Texas’ Fort Bend County and Georgia’s Gwinnett and Cobb Counties. Opportunities are blossoming in all these places and many more like them throughout the country, and Romney-Clinton voters can be the deciding factor.

Right now, they are helping to fuel Democrats’ chances in the special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District—the seat once held by Newt Gingrich—in an area of suburban Atlanta that Romney won by more than 20 points, and which Clinton lost by only 1 point.

And it’s not just Georgia: Democrats have to solidify the support of Romney-Clinton voters if they have any hope of retaking Congress. Twenty-three House Republicans represent districts that voted for Clinton in 2016. Only eight of those districts overlap with the 20 Republicans in seats that Obama won in 2012. Democrats need a strategy to win back all 35 of these districts—a feat that is almost impossible without crossover supporters, of both the Obama-Trump and Romney-Clinton varieties.

But how to win them over?

In 2016, many of these voters broke away from Trump over concerns about his temperament and fitness for the office of the presidency. They didn’t believe Trump could handle the job, and were worried that his erratic temperament could lead the country into dangerous situations. Watching the first four months of the Trump administration will have only deepened that view.

Perhaps you remember Clinton’s TV ads, many of which simply showed people—children, especially—watching clips of Trump’s speeches, wide-eyed at the bombast they were witnessing. Our internal testing showed that those spots were particularly effective among Romney voters who were leaning to Clinton. There was a deliberate strategy behind the “show don’t tell” approach of letting Trump speak for himself: Highly educated Americans were often skeptical of advertising with overstated or undocumented claims, but were very open to evaluating Trump on his own words and deeds.

They didn’t like what they saw from Trump the candidate, and they most likely do not like what they see from Trump the president. As a thought experiment, can you think of a single thing that Trump’s Republicans have done that appeals to Romney-Clinton voters? They disapprove of House Republicans’ calamitous health care repeal, and are especially angry about what it could mean for people with pre-existing conditions. While it’s common knowledge that the public is heavily opposed to the repeal bill, strong opposition is much higher among voters who backed Clinton in 2016 versus those who backed Obama in 2012 (61 percent versus 52 percent), according to this week’s Morning Consult/Politico poll. These voters are equally frustrated by the Republicans’ attempts to defund Planned Parenthood. They’re heartbroken by the stories of the “Dreamers” who immigrated to the United States as children and are now being deported. They’re tired of having climate change waved away as a “hoax.” They’re embarrassed by the way Trump has behaved on the international stage. And they’re deeply disturbed by the unfolding scandal surrounding the Trump team’s ties to Russia—and perhaps even more concerned about the administration’s quickly unraveling attempts to cover it up. (In a May 24 Quinnipiac national survey, 66 percent of college-educated white voters said they are concerned about Trump’s relationship with Russia.)

As elected Republicans stand by their man, inhabiting roles that vary between rubber stamps and accomplices, they risk permanently turning off this major segment of the electorate that has voted Republican in the past, but cannot stomach Trump and those who enable him.

All that having been said, there’s a difference between Republicans turning off these voters and Democrats gaining their support—and the latter will not happen unless we Democrats make a concerted effort.

Winning these voters doesn’t mean that we have to change our agenda. Rather, we have talk about the type of quality-of-life issues that matter to these suburban voters—which means advocating our same policy priorities in tailored ways. For example, most Democrats are committed to a robust investment in infrastructure—and that shouldn’t change. The difference may be in the way we talk about that idea to voters who are on the fence: Obama-Trump voters may see the infrastructure plan in terms of its ability to create jobs, while Romney-Clinton voters see infrastructure’s appeal in boosted productivity and reduced amounts of time wasted each week stuck in rush-hour traffic. Democrats across the spectrum have increasingly found common ground in the fight for affordable college—an issue important to some voters because it’s their only chance to send their kids to college and important to others who are concerned that their college-bound children will be saddled with record levels of debt for decades.

Democrats have a window of opportunity to shape American politics by courting these voters just as Trump and his Republican apologists repel them.

Doing that doesn’t mean avoiding the obvious—Trump won—or ignoring the reasons why that happened. It’s natural after an election like 2016 to focus on the voters that Democrats lost—and, indeed, we should spend time grappling with the reasons they supported Trump and what it would take to win them back. But we can’t let that chatter drown out our ability to make the case to other voters at the same time.

We must take advantage of the opportunities we earned in 2016. We can’t let ourselves be so consumed with rehashing the last war that we lose the one we are in now.