PINE TOWNSHIP, PA. — If you spent any time in Pittsburgh’s northern suburbs listening to voters and learning what’s crucial to them when it comes to schools, community development, economic well-being and the emotional toll of Covid-19 lockdowns, you’d at least be skeptical of the narrative media and polls that showed that suburban voters are no longer center-right.
Not a Republican per se, but a center-right.
Most reporters certainly didn’t have time to do this. Instead, they relied on the scoldings of our cultural curators in sports, media, and Hollywood as an indicator of how these affluent, educated voters would vote. Surely, reporters thought, these suburbs had fully embraced the “wokeness” and rejected center-right values ​​and principles. They thought they would give in to cultural pressure, push to the left and with their votes cause a blue shockwave throughout the country.
These reporters put their faith in what they saw in the polls or on Twitter and predicted that denigration of the center-right would pull the country left. Except for the people who voted here and in endorsement races across the country, they vehemently rejected that pressure.
By all accounts, Rob Mercuri should never have won a seat in the open House of Representatives. His opponent, Emily Skopov, was well-financed; had support from the teachers union, abortion rights groups, and several climate change groups; and supported Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s restrictive approach to the pandemic. Skopow had everything pollsters and the national narrative believed she needed to beat the Republican: She is a woman, a progressive, and she ran for the seat in the face of a growing and affluent demographic.
She lost almost 9 percentage points – again repeating the same number she gained when she ran against former Republican House Speaker Mike Turzai, who chose not to seek re-election this term.
Mercury was not alone. In another equally affluent suburb across the Allegheny River, Devlin Robinson defeated Democratic state Sen. Pam Iovino by a 53% to 47% margin.
On Thursday night at Oakmont, powerful House Democratic Minority Leader Frank Dermody had an edge over Republican Carrie DelRosso, 52% to 48%. Dermody has held office in the affluent suburban district along the Allegheny River for decades, but she may not succeed in 2020.
Pollsters have allowed President Donald Trump to obstruct the electorate’s understanding, as have reporters and political scientists.
For a brief moment as a reporter, I had difficulty understanding what the data was telling me. It went against what my reporting was telling me, what voters were telling me, and what cultural cues were telling me. So I returned to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin in search of this blue wave.
It turns out that the blue wave only existed on Twitter or in a survey – never once in an experience or interview.
Traditionally, a president, whether center-right or center-left, pushes the country in the opposite direction. Former President Barack Obama pushed the country to the right three times – in 2010, 2014 and 2016 – in response to his policies. Former President George W. Bush pushed the country left in 2006 and 2008. Former President Bill Clinton pushed the country right in 1994.
While Trump pushed the country slightly to the center-left in the 2018 midterm elections, his policies (tax cuts, trade deal, deregulation) and the left’s insane pressure on our culture have definitely pushed the country back toward the center-right.
It could be argued that these competing forces started a red wave that not only kept the coalition that put Trump in office intact, but also grew larger and more diverse, with Republicans winning the largest number of non-white voters since 1960 .
Republicans didn’t just win seats in the House and State Senate here in Pennsylvania. He also has a greater than 50 percent chance of winning two statewide offices. Republicans also gained House and Senate seats in Ohio and West Virginia, while Democrats lost ground in North Carolina and Iowa.
And all that bragging and bragging about the Democrats’ prospects of winning the Texas House of Representatives fell flat.
Republicans also increased their gubernatorial majority by re-electing all Republican governors running in 2020 and flipping Montana. The GOP advantage among governors is currently 27 to 23.
Despite having all the money in the world (after all, half a billion was counted) and all the pressure culture put on these voters, these voters showed up and voted for their communities.
Additionally, record numbers of Latino and black voters voted for center-right candidates. Why? Ask them. Much of this movement to the right has to do with opportunity, aspiration, community and faith, concepts that the talking heads on cable news never touch on. They only assume that these voters are on the same side as the Ivy League women’s studies student on social justice, climate justice, pronoun justice, and justice.
These voters – call them timid Trump voters or timid Tory voters – don’t give the same respect to larger institutions as they do to the elites. In fact, they view them skeptically and are unlikely to give them information they consider private.
The center-right has not defied the odds. It was always present. There just weren’t enough people asking people why. It has no color or geographic location, but on Tuesday night it showed that it is persistent and does not adequately respond to external cultural pressures.
Elitism also did not defy the odds. Within hours of the vote results being announced, elites watched in horror as Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden did not win in a landslide and there was no blue wave. They faced their cultural blindness and continued to avoid the reality that our country has moved not to the left, but to the center-right in the last four years.
They also still miss how the conservative populist coalition that brought Trump into office stayed together and grew, with many of those voters choosing not to vote for him as the primary candidate but happily opting for other GOP candidates.
Salena Zito is a CNN political analyst and a reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. Reaches Everyman and Everywoman through leather journalism, traveling from Main Street to the Beltway and all places in between.
