Suburbs were Democratic territory on Tuesday. What about in 2024?

From Northern Virginia to Northern Kentucky, America’s suburbs rejected Republican candidates on Tuesday, sending a message that greenbelt communities where elections were once won and lost were increasingly siding with the Democratic Party — especially on abortion rights.

Only in the New York suburbs, on eastern Long Island, did the Republican message about crime and “open borders” seem to resonate. Democrats took a beating in Suffolk County, where suburbanites may be reeling from the migrant crisis plaguing the western metropolis.

Elsewhere, in the suburbs of Washington, DC, Louisville, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio, voters rejected Republican messages on abortion, LGBTQ issues and crime, signaling that while they may be concerned about President Biden’s age and abilities. , they may be more concerned about Republican positions in the era of Donald J. Trump.

“Suburban America left the Republican Party in 2016 when they didn’t like Trump’s behavior,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and messaging consultant. “They started coming back in 2022 when they rejected Joe Biden’s economic policies, but they will leave again when the conversation turns to abortion and social policy.”

Abortion was dominant; Suburban voters outside Ohio’s largest cities voted overwhelmingly to enshrine the right to abortion in the state’s constitution. Kentucky’s incumbent Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, who took a hard line on abortion rights and kitchen table issues like infrastructure spending, not only won Jefferson County, home to Louisville, and Fayette County, home to Lexington. He also defeated his Republican challenger, Daniel Cameron, in Kenton and Campbell counties, once reliably Republican strongholds across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.

Two years ago, Glenn Youngkin’s victorious Republican campaign for governor in Virginia left some Democrats concerned that their grip on the sprawl outside the nation’s capital was not as tight as they had thought. Those same suburbs on Tuesday made Danica Roem, a Democrat, the South’s first transgender senator as they helped Democrats win a majority in the Virginia General Assembly and maintain control of the Senate.

“We’re going to let Democrats get the message across and make everything about abortion,” said John Whitbeck, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia who lives in Loudoun County, a Washington suburb. “The Republican Party must modernize its message on this issue if we want to convince Democrats and independents to make the switch and vote Republican. The reality is that Virginia has a number of districts that vote blue. In a year where Roe v. Wade brings intensity, it’s impossible for us to win those districts.”

In retrospect, Youngkin’s victory may have been a hangover from the coronavirus pandemic, as suburban parents worried about school closures and responded to his singular focus on education, said Heather Williams, interim chair of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, that is committed to elections. Democrats to state legislators.

This time, she said, some of the same parents pushed back against Republican efforts to ban LGBTQ-themed books from libraries and more generally inject socially conservative views into the school system.

“The issue of basic freedoms still resonates deeply,” she said.

In the highly contentious school board races around Cedar Rapids, Iowa, voters decisively rejected every candidate backed by the right-wing group Moms for Liberty, which had spearheaded efforts to ban LGBTQ books from libraries and impose more conservative scrutiny exercise over curricula.

In 2021, with the pandemic still hanging over schools, the group claimed victory on 33 seats on the school board in the swinging suburbs of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. On Tuesday, Moms for Liberty candidates lost five school board races in central Bucks County.

“They’re just crushed,” said Jeffrey Pollock, a Democratic pollster who worked with candidates in Pennsylvania. “Voters are looking for common-sense candidates, and that includes how they will view Donald Trump a year from now.”

Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty and former school board member from Indian River County, Florida, expressed no regrets, saying that across the country: about 90 school board candidates supported by her group won, out of a total of 202 she supported. Moms for Liberty’s “win rate” did drop, from more than 50 percent in 2022 to 43 percent on Tuesday, she said. But, she said, the group will be back in 2024 with 139 candidates, better training for candidates, more money and more professional political partnerships.

“We’re just getting started,” she said.

The one Republican bright spot was significant: New York. In the otherwise disappointing 2022 midterm elections, Republican victories in the suburbs of the nation’s largest city gave the party limited control of the House of Representatives. Democrats are counting on a comeback to help retake the House of Representatives.

But the signal sent Tuesday was that where voters see the massive increase in migrants from the southern border, the Republican message on crime and border security is working. In these areas, voters were not asked to litigate the abortion issue.

Ed Romaine easily changed the Suffolk County executive’s office from Democrat to Republican. A Republican, Kristy Marmorato, won a seat on the Bronx City Council for the first time in more than fifty years.

Of course, the threat of an abortion ban did not hang over these races – because reproductive rights are already secure in New York.

Reid J. Epstein reporting contributed.