GOP strategist and CEO Sarah Chamberlain said Republicans must work to win back support from female suburban voters following Tuesday’s midterm elections that say Democrats recapture the House.
“Do you think that there’s a chance that the Republican Party can win back these suburban swing areas?” Hill.TV co-host Krystal Ball asked Chamberlain during an interview that aired on Friday.
“Absolutely, we have to — in order to be a majority party, we have to go back and get these suburban moms, and if you look at the latest polling, we lost some of the suburban dads, too, so we have to go, we have to appeal to them,” she replied.
Chamberlain, who is the CEO of Republican Mainstreet Partnership, said her party is losing favor among many suburban voters, particularly women, because of President Trump’s overall tone.
“What happened in a lot of our suburban districts, it came down to ‘hey you guys have done great policy, but we still — we’re not crazy about the tweets,’ ” she told Hill.TV.
The Republican strategist believes the way to win back suburban voters is by focusing on key issues like the economy, which she argues the party didn’t give enough attention to. Trump instead chose to make immigration his top issue going into Tuesday’s midterms, calling for an end to birthright citizenship and painting a caravan of migrants headed for the southern border as an “invasion.”
Democrats reclaimed much of the suburbs nationwide in Tuesday’s vote.
More than 80 suburban counties and cities voted more Democratic than they did in 2016, according to an analysis by USA Today.
Some GOP leaders are already saying that this shift could be problematic for President Trump and Republicans going into the 2020 election.
After it became clear that Democrats won back control of the House on Tuesday, Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) called on the GOP to address the “problem,” particularly when it comes to suburban women.
“We’ve got to address the suburban women problem, because it’s real,” the senator told Fox News.
— Tess Bonn
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