For all of the attention to this year’s House of Representatives special elections, November’s gubernatorial races in New Jersey and especially Virginia will likely offer a more revealing measure of how Donald Trump’s presidency is reconfiguring the political landscape. …
With his bristling nationalist message and repeated gestures toward white racial resentments, Trump is generally strengthening the GOP’s hand among culturally conservative working-class, evangelical and rural whites. But he’s made those gains at the price of alienating more socially moderate suburban white-collar whites and deepening the resistance Republicans face among minority voters and Millennials. CONT.
Ronald Brownstein, CNN