This NYT article about Congressional districts being targeted by Democrats in 2018 is about pickup opportunities in the suburbs, and they lead with a familiar example.
Rep. John Culberson
As she sat with a glass of sauvignon blanc waiting for a women-focused Democratic fund-raiser to begin, Nancy Sharp let loose in a Texas-seasoned drawl why she and so many other onetime supporters of the Bush family were abandoning the Republicans.
“Have you ever heard of a stupider and trashier man than the president of the United States?” asked Ms. Sharp, an interior designer who lives not far from the elegant condominium where about 75 women gathered this month to help the House candidate Lizzie Pannill Fletcher. “Calling a U.S. senator ‘Pocahontas’ in front of God and everyone!”
If Democrats are to claim the House majority next year, their path back to power will go through places like the Huntingdon, a 34-floor high-rise in the River Oaks section of Houston that was once home to Enron’s Kenneth L. Lay, has no fewer than five valets on a busy night and sits in the district of Representative John Culberson, a veteran Republican who may be in for the race of his life.
The mounting backlash to President Trump that is threatening his party’s control of Congress is no longer confined just to swing districts on either coast. Officials in both parties believe that Republican control of the House is now in grave jeopardy because a group of districts that are historically Republican or had been trending that way before the 2016 election are slipping away.
Much attention has been paid to the handful of seats in New York, New Jersey and California that are represented by Republicans but voted for Hillary Clinton last year. But even with district lines drawn to favor Republicans in many states, the swelling antipathy toward Mr. Trump threatens to breach the party’s defenses and stretch the congressional battlefield beyond the dimensions Republicans and Democrats anticipated a year ago.
“There’s no illusion about the storm that’s coming,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, invoking last month’s governor’s races and last week’s Senate special election. “If you had any doubts, they were wiped away after New Jersey, Virginia and Alabama.”
From Texas to Illinois, Kansas to Kentucky, there are Republican districts filled with college-educated, affluent voters who appear to be abandoning their usually conservative leanings and newly invigorated Democrats, some of them nonwhite, who are eager to use the midterms to take out their anger on Mr. Trump.
“If you look at the patterns of where gains are being made and who is creating the foundation for those gains, it’s the same: An energized Democratic base is linking arms with disaffected suburban voters,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, who as a member of Congress in 2006 helped Democrats win back the House. “The president’s conduct has basically given voters this permission slip to go against the Republicans.”
The main thesis of the article is about how suburban counties are trending Democratic post-Trump. CD07 isn’t really a canonical example of this, since it covers a fair amount of Houston’s urban core, but on demographics CD07 is a good fit. It’s also the go-to district for all kinds of stories about the political climate and the peril Republican incumbents are in. The fact that CD07 is now considered a tossup means we’re likely continue seeing it featured in the media.
“Have you ever heard of a stupider and trashier man than the president of the United States?”
Nope, definitely not. While I am glad these suburban GOP types are increasingly willing to declare that the Emperor is buck nekked, I remain astounded at the degree of eye-averting that went on last year. The ONLY thing positive that I can honestly say about one Donald J. Trump is that he never hid just how trashy and vulgar and ignorant and selfish and mean he was/ still is.
My opinion of Trump was formed a couple decades ago. I concluded that he was a contemptible excuse for a man then, and it’s only gone lower since.
Does Culberson live in Texas?
In the early 1990s I went to a Christmas party at a friend’s in Copperfield, and John Culberson and his wife dropped by. They were neighbors. He still lives in the same house in that neighborhood.