The GOP Suburban Strategy

The first night of the Republican convention was predictably bonkers and a mess of lies and mistruths.

The Republican National Convention started off with a parade of dishonesty, in stark contrast with last week's Democratic convention. While CNN also watched and fact-checked the Democrats, those four nights combined didn't have the number of misleading and false claims made on the first night of the Republicans' convention.

That wasn't the point.  The point was the McCloskeys.

The couple that chased Black Lives Matter protestors away from their front lawn in St. Louis at gunpoint hit up the Republican National Convention on Monday night. And what they had to say was downright dark.

The McCloskeys, a pair of personal injury lawyers who famously pointed guns at demonstrators in front of their palatial residence this summer, instantly went down as one of the most unusual appearances in the history of presidential conventions. They’re a pair no other president would have invited — but Trump.

Mark and Patty McCloskey warned that in an America under a future President Joe Biden, other Americans would likewise be forced to defend themselves from protestors on their own front lawns.

“No matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America,” said Patty McCloskey.

The couple beamed into the convention from their Renaissance palazzo-style mansion in St. Louis, seated on a couch in a room richly-paneled with dark wood, and spoke straight to the camera.

They warned other Americans that they, too, may soon have to wave their own weapons at unruly gangs of demonstrators if Donald Trump loses the 2020 election.

“What you saw happen to us could just as easily happen to any of you who are watching from quiet neighborhoods across this country,” Patty McCloskey said. “And that’s what we want to speak to you about tonight.”

The one thing that will nearly guarantee a Biden loss is if the college-educated White suburban women that voted for the Democrats in 2018 and supported Black Lives Matter over the last three months turn on him over Fear Of Those People In My Neighborhood™.

Patricia McCloskey: They’re not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single family home zoning. This forced re-zoning would bring crime, lawlessness and low quality apartments into now thriving suburban neighborhoods. President Trump smartly ended this government overreach, but Joe Biden wants to bring it back. These are the policies that are coming to a neighborhood near you. So make no mistake, no matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats America.

Mark McCloskey: At this moment in history, if you stand up for yourself and for the values our country was founded on, the mob spurred on by their allies and the media will try to destroy you. You’ve seen us on your TV screens and Twitter feeds. You know that we’re not the kind of people who backed down. Thankfully, neither is Donald Trump. President Trump will defend the God given right of every American to protect their homes and their families. But more than that, Trump’s vision for America is a country where you have an opportunity to work hard and build the life you dream of with a job you love, with your children being educated in great schools in a community where your family can play in the backyard without fear, worship in a church without shame and express your beliefs without retribution. Trump brought us the greatest economy our country had ever seen. The Democrats have brought us nothing but destruction.

Patricia McCloskey: When we don’t have basic safety and security in our communities, we’ll never be free to build a brighter future for ourselves, for our children or for our country. That’s what’s at stake in this election and that’s why we must re-elect Donald Trump. God bless you. God bless the president and God bless the United States. 

This right here?  This is the real GOP Suburban Strategy.

The only question is how well it will work, and how many votes Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and down-ticket Democrats, are going to lose because of it. Look, I've told you before that the weakness in liberals is NIMBY stuff, and Republicans have always been able to prey on that weakness.  It's why Republicans have won the white vote since before I was born.

But how well will it work?  There's evidence that maybe, just maybe, it's not going to this time. Not even in the Charlotte suburbs like Cornelius, as Politico's Michael Kruse found out.

The suburbs, like this one, just up Interstate 77 from the official site of the start of this week’s Republican National Convention, make up the terrain on which the coming election almost certainly will be decided. The suburbs almost always are a political battlefield, or at least have been for the last generation or more. And if Trump can’t win or even loses a sufficient slice of his support in Cornelius, one of the whitest and most reliably Republican of the key suburbs in this critical swing state, he probably can’t win North Carolina, according to pollsters and strategists. And if he can’t win North Carolina, they say, he probably can’t win reelection. Hence the message he’s been delivering with increasing frequency and ferocity of late, appealing to the “Suburban Housewives of America,” charging that Joe Biden wants to “destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream,” and stressing that residents of American suburbia want “security” and not “low-income housing” forced “down their throats.”

“Why,” he asked in a tweet over the weekend, “would Suburban Women vote for Biden and the Democrats when Democrat run cities are now rampant with crime … which could easily spread to the suburbs?”

It was a prominent and recurring theme on the opening night of the mostly virtual RNC. “They want,” said Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple from St. Louis who pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters marching past their house earlier this summer, referring to Democrats and echoing language used repeatedly by Trump himself, “to abolish the suburbs.”

The response I got from actual suburban women here on Monday, though, was a mixture of eye-rolls, laughter and confusion. “It’s not something I’m afraid of,” said Connie Searle, 61, retired from a human resources job at a bank.

“I haven’t heard anyone voice concerns about being afraid that angry mobs are going to come out this way,” said Sue Rankin-White, 72, who worked for the Department of Education in Washington and lived in northern Virginia before moving here.

Afraid of the city? “I’m here because of its proximity to Charlotte,” said Camerin Allgood McKinnon, 36, a mother of two who teaches dance.

While Searle, Rankin-White and McKinnon are all Democrats, the prospect of lawlessness in the suburbs doesn’t appear to be a top-of-mind concern, either, for women who aren’t Democrats. On Monday evening, I knocked on the front door of Meredith Wolverton, because the school teacher had posted on the Nextdoor app a string of anti-mask comments and a read of her Twitter timeline confirmed her support for Trump, even though she’s registered as unaffiliated. Standing on her porch, though, when I asked if she was frightened by a possible “invasion” of crime coming up from Charlotte, she flatly said no.

“I’m not concerned about that,” she told me. And she also wasn’t afraid of the coronavirus pandemic. What she was afraid of, she suggested, was the Democrats’ overreaction to it. “I want to be able to go to church,” she said. “I want to be able to go to the gym. I want to be able to go do all these things and have my rights as an American citizen.”

Affixed to her house was an American flag. Ditto for the houses around her. Cornelius started more than a century ago as a mill town. Its growth along with the rest of the area in the last few decades has been dizzying—population less than 3,000 in 1990, still not quite 12,000 in 2000, almost 25,000 in 2010 and now more than 30,000 and still going, with people moving in from the Northeast, the Midwest and elsewhere. But it’s maintained a largely Republican character. The mayor is a Republican. All but one of the five-person town board are Republicans. Sen. Thom Tillis started his political career here as a member of that town board.

In 2008, in the four Cornelius precincts, John McCain beat Barack Obama by an aggregate 2,663 votes. In 2012, Mitt Romney beat Obama by 4,043 votes. And in 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 2,984 votes.

The last midterms, though, ushered in a hard-to-ignore change, a byproduct of court-ordered redrawing of districts but also the shifting demographics and political preferences of the many newcomers. Going into the 2018 election, people here were represented in the state house, the state senate and the county commission by three Republican men. After? Three Democratic women.

And this summer, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by Minneapolis police, citizens have clamored to have removed a monument of a Confederate soldier in front of a church on one of the town’s main drags — and marched for racial justice in a peaceful protest organized by a trio of local high school students.

“That is something that would not have happened even five years ago, I don’t believe,” Pam Jones, a founder and leader of a group called Unity in Community, told me.

Being from this part of NC, the blood-red foothills of Catawba County, I can tell you the shift from working-class white Democrats to Trump Republicans began 40 years ago with Ronald Reagan and was cemented in 1997 when the GE transformer plant in Conover moved to Mexico under Bill Clinton's NAFTA.  The plant was demolished in 2016 but the damage was done.

And if people here are even considering Joe Biden?

Trump is screwed.

I would love to see some Democratic women in an ad about what Republicans have really done to school funding and failed infrastructure.  And you know who is doing just that?  Amy McGrath, here in Kentucky.



This is a good ad.  For all his "bring home the bacon" stuff, Mitch McConnell hasn't lifted a finger to fix the Brent Spence Bridge and Rand Paul wants to make it into a toll project.

We need more, much more of this to counter the Republican fear card. This is how you do it.