Will those highly educated suburban voters stick with Dems without Trump in the White House? Virginia will answer that this November.
Those "highly educated suburban voters" in VA were considerably more Democratic than other "highly educated suburban voters" in other (actually competitive or traditionally R) states even before Trump, so no, it won’t.
Didn’t the voters that you are referring to vote for Biden but generally vote Republican downballot even in 2020 (except for maybe Mark Kelly and Abigail Spanberger)?
I mean those highly educated voters in VA voted quite Democratic down ballot for a while now. Even in 2014, Mark Warner apparently won Mclean, Virginia.
Yes Virginia ones have been (as MT Treasurer stated), but many highly educated voters in other places that voted for Biden did not vote Dem downballot in 2020. I’m thinking of places like NE-02, WOW in Wisconsin, Olmsted county (Rochester) Minnesota (costing Dems the state senate there), suburban Dallas and Houston (costing Dems the state House and a House seat there), suburban St Louis (costing Dems a House and State Senate seat there), suburban Pittsburgh (costing Dems a state House and Senate seat there).
Yes, I don’t disagree, but my point was that we can’t really extrapolate preferences/trends among suburban voters in those places from suburban trends in VA. VA is much closer to an Atlanta-type situation (although certainly not quite as extreme) where there’s not much split-ticket voting and the suburban areas are very reliably D up and down the ballot due to a large presence of government workers, an unusually large transient population, the closeness to the most liberal metro in the country, generational turnover (this is an especially important factor in the South), and a sizable non-white population. NoVA and Henrico County are not your average competitive-ish middle-class suburbs that are comparable to a place like Bucks County, PA or Omaha, NE. I’m not saying that they’re all reliable Democrats or that there won’t be any interesting shifts at all, but Democrats could hold up fairly well in metro VA and still lose substantial ground in other suburban areas in other states. It’s just not a bellwether state.
