Republicans Struggle Without The Suburbs

By John Hood

RALEIGH — When midterm avalanches crush incumbent parties, it isn’t useful to assign the blame to a single rock.

When Democrats got flattened in the 1994 and 2010 cycles, their fate was sealed not only by policy overreaches on healthcare reform — by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, respectively — but also by economic worries, cultural controversies, and impolitic comments by the president and his team. When Republicans got walloped in 1974, 2006, and 2018, there were multiple factors, as well, from the perceived malfeasance and scandals of administrations to painful price inflation and unpopular foreign policies.

Presidential disapproval is always present, of course, but it is never monocausal. On the eve of the blue tsunami of 2026, Donald Trump was one of the most unpopular presidents in modern times. Some voters resented his tariffs, which hiked consumer prices at a time of heightened concern about the cost of living. Some blamed the war in the Middle East for driving up energy prices, at least. Some disliked what they perceived to be rampant corruption, the excesses of immigration enforcement, or the president’s crude comments and distracted behavior. Among the many voters who shared all of these concerns, they prioritized them differently, although a plurality pointed to prices as their top issue.

In other words, many rocks fell — but affordability had the biggest claim to be a boulder.

Here in North Carolina, both that boulder and its somewhat-smaller companions fell everywhere, but I would submit that the most-pummeled areas were the suburbs of Charlotte, the Triangle, the Triad, Wilmington, Fayetteville, and Asheville. At the legislative level, most observers deemed it likely that the last vestiges of GOP representation in Wake and Mecklenburg counties would disappear, and that Republican incumbents would struggle in New Hanover, Guilford, Forsyth, Cumberland, and Cabarrus.

What few expected was that Republicans would loses in such places as Johnston, Lee, Alamance, Gaston, and Henderson. Losing urban districts would certainly have shrunk GOP majorities in the North Carolina Senate and House, and potentially flipped the latter blue. What delivered a near-supermajority for House Democrats, nearly flipped the Senate, and cost as many as five GOP incumbents their seats in the U.S. House was the collapse of Republican support in the suburbs.

You can see this on county-by-county maps of election results, to be sure, but this can be somewhat misleading. Counties such as Gaston, Henderson, Alamance, and Johnston still encompass not just suburbs as properly defined but also small towns and rural areas. There are also suburbs within so-called urban counties, and these tend to be the only politically competitive slices of those otherwise-blue places.

Another approach, then, is simply to ask voters to describe their communities. Consortia of media organizations commissioned election-day surveys in 2024 and 2026 for the nation as a whole and for North Carolina in particular. Although differences in methodology confound the analysis a bit, the data do signal an important shift.

In 2024, when Trump won North Carolina by a bit over three percentage points, he won self-identified suburban voters by 57% to Kamala Harris’s 41%. This year, when Roy Cooper clobbered Michael Whatley by nearly 20 points, he won suburban voters by 65% to Whatley’s 33%. The 2026 results in down-ballot races weren’t so skewed, of course, but they proved decisive. If Republicans cannot win the suburbs, they have little chance of either winning statewide offices or securing majorities in the state legislature.

This isn’t about income, by the way. In 2026, the U.S. Senate preferences of voters with household incomes below $100,000 were not statistically distinguishable from the voting preferences of those with incomes above $100,000. My point is that the kind of everyday concerns prioritized by voters in the suburbs — cost of living, traffic, schools, and public safety — have to become the priority of politicians who aspire to represent them.

Roy Cooper’s campaign slogan was “make stuff cost less.” Just days after Halloween, his party came home with treats. All Republicans got were rocks.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).