Will the VA landslide set off a panic and a stampede of GOP retirements?

[mvd10]

The statewide races were not landslides by any means. The legislative losses were almost exclusively in NOVA, so I would presume some Clinton-Suburban Republicans might consider that when determining whether to run for reelection. While tonight was not good, it isn't time to sound the alarm that 2018 is going to be wave. If Trump cuts taxes, suburbanites will come home.

But the GOP's tax cut plan raises taxes on a lot of those suburbanites and takes away the deductions for their high state taxes and their big mortgages.

The property tax deduction will remain (althought it will be capped at 10k) and I don't think most suburbanites have mortgages of $500k so they probably should see a tax cut in the first few years. By 2027 their taxes may have increased because of different inflation measures and the expiration of some tax credits but I think the TPC analysis showed that a large majority of voters would see a tax cut in the first couple of years. Ironically all the tax breaks start to expire when a Democrat should take office .

[mvd10]

It's interesting to note that there also are wealthy suburban counties that barely trended D in Virginia. Stafford and Fauquier barely trended D. I think there is a difference between the NoVa counties close to DC (Fairfax, Arlington and to a lesser extent Loudoun) and the other wealthy counties. Those closer to DC already trended heavily towards the Dems under Romney, McCain and Bush so just returning to movement conservatism won't return them to the GOP column (they probably were lost for the GOP already). I suppose it's because there are a lot of wealthy government workers in these counties, which makes them much more receptive to bigger government. The same may go for the tech suburbs in California. Tech probably benefits more from more government investment in education and infrastructure than from huge income tax cuts. They're much different from the traditional wealthy suburban counties that probably still voted Trump (though by a smaller margin than they voted in Romney for 2012).

[mvd10]

I'm not saying they aren't trending D (ofcourse they are with Trump's virulent anti-intellectualism), but parts NoVa (and specifically Fairfax/Arlington) are different from the other wealthy suburbs. A lot of wealthy places voted for Gillespie or Guadagno btw, and the wealthy still were Gillespie's strongest group according to the CNN exit polls.

[mvd10]

Fauquier and most of Stafford are not suburban and are not nearly as wealthy.

According to Wikipedia (probably not the best source, but I doubt they're off by much) Stafford and Fauquier are in the top 15 wealthiest counties.

I kinda assumed they were suburban but I could be wrong about that .