Suburban voters are the well-educated, which means they've spent time in a college which may have warped their views toward liberalism. I'm willing to bet most young suburbanites are blue. It just might not be a demographic we can rely upon any more.
This is undoubtedly true, and it warps people's views toward conservatism.
Link. However, we need to reverse that. We need to make a coordinated effort to get conservatives into higher education. We can't let them be leftist reeducation camps, which is what they're very fast becoming. As much as the Right has mostly liked Greg Abbott and Rick Perry, neither of them were good on higher education. They largely trusted the issue to establishment figures, which means letting the career leftists have their way. That needs to change.
In the short and medium term, we need to start advocating conservatism. We don't really do that anymore, and that needs to change. I don't mean cheerleading. We have plenty of publications and people who do that. I mean actually advocating and persuading people who aren't conservatives to accept the conservative policy agenda, and that means being able to talk to them.
The reality is that we can't afford to lose the suburbs. Saying "we can't rely on them any more" isn't an answer we can accept. That is how states turn blue. It's how we lost California. When the GOP was winning California, it was losing but not getting completely destroyed in the big cities and decisively winning the suburbs and rural areas. For example, in 1988 Bush got 46.8 percent in Los Angeles County and 26 percent in San Francisco County. He got 68 percent in Orange County. First, the cities turned from defeats into routs. That made the state purple. Then the suburbs became almost split. That made the state blue. Now the suburbs lean blue, and that's the end of the GOP in California.
The same trend is starting in Texas. Dallas and Houston are turning into Democratic strongholds. The suburbs still lean red, so we can still win statewide. However, that's changing, and if we let them go much further, the state is lost. Collin County almost elected two Democratic state representatives in 2018, which would have been unthinkable just recently. You warned me about that last year, and I didn't believe you. You were right.
It also could be that the incumbent just can't win during the midterms. As you said, it also could be Trump or a combination of all three. Time will tell.
To be clear, it's not all Trump. The problem is deeper than Trump. If it was just Trump, then the GOP would have been competitive in California 8 years ago, and it obviously was not. Trump is simply accelerating and aggravating a problem that already existed.
