By: The Editorial Board – wsj.com – May 17, 2023

Three times in a row, since 2018, Republicans have been disappointed on election night in November, in large part because they lost the suburbs. More defeats Tuesday for the GOP in Pennsylvania, Colorado and Florida suggest the erosion is continuing.

After a special election Tuesday outside Philadelphia, Democrats will retain their one-seat majority in the Pennsylvania House that they captured last fall. The 163rd district in Delaware County was long held by the GOP, but Democrat Mike Zabel flipped it in 2018. Mr. Zabel resigned after three women accused him of sexual harassment, giving Republicans another chance to retake the seat.

Democrat Heather Boyd focused on abortion. She won, 60% to 39%, according to the latest returns. Compare that to the registration data: 51% of the district’s voters are Democrats, 37% are Republicans, and 12% are unaffiliated. Ms. Boyd’s Republican opponent was massively outspent, but the GOP can’t win statewide without a better showing in the Philadelphia suburbs.

Meantime, the GOP also lost two of its last urban redoubts. Democrat Donna Deegan, a former TV anchor, took the Jacksonville, Fla., mayor’s race with 52% of the vote. The GOP has run Jacksonville for most of the past three decades, and the U.S. Navy has a large presence there. In an even bigger surprise, independent local businessman Yemi Mobolade won the mayoral runoff in Colorado Springs against a well-known Republican. The GOP has run the conservative city for 45 years.

A silver lining Tuesday in Pennsylvania is that sane Republicans rejected Judge Patricia McCullough, who was seeking the party’s nomination for a state Supreme Court seat. “I was the only judge in the entire country to enter an order to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election results,” she once bragged. The GOP nominated instead Judge Carolyn Carluccio. But the fact that party money and energy is still being wasted by President Trump’s 2020 election grievances is a running GOP sore.

With Mr. Trump trying again in 2024, there’s a significant risk of hitting a suburban wall next November. In Kentucky on Tuesday, state Attorney General Daniel Cameron secured the GOP nomination to challenge Gov. Andy Beshear. “The Trump culture of winning is alive and well in Kentucky,” Mr. Cameron said, in a shot at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had endorsed another Republican candidate.

In a GOP primary, Mr. Trump’s imprimatur is valuable, but not so much in a general election. Mr. Beshear won’t be easy to beat this fall, and Mr. Cameron’s strategy of hugging Mr. Trump will be tested. The same goes for the Senate next year, where a friendly map gives the GOP an opening. As Mitch McConnellrecently warned: “We do have the possibility of screwing this up, and that gets back to candidate recruitment.”

Democrats gained a Senate seat last year, after the GOP picked fringe nominees. If those same characters, or similar ones, try again next year, they won’t magically be more popular. Electability matters. That means giving up Mr. Trump’s 2020 conspiracy theories, looking to the future, and finding an abortion compromise that Republicans can sell to the voters they used to take for granted.

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Source: More Election Warnings for the GOP – WSJ