Republicans are facing the ire

© Steve Earley/AP Rep. Scott Taylor (R-Va.) stops to talk to constituents as he leaves the stage after concluding a town hall meeting in Yorktown, Va., on Tuesday.

It’s a particularly acute issue here in the cradle of America’s birth, where the British surrendered to General George Washington in 1781, and where, down the road along the James River, the first English settlers arrived in 1607.

Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District should be competitive; Trump won here by a mere 3.4 percentage points, similar to Republican nominees Mitt Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008. But the local Democrats fielded a community activist who spent less than $5,000 on the race, and Taylor won by an astounding 23 percentage points.

He’s one of 10 Republicans who hold seats that Trump won by less than 4 percentage points. These seats, along with the 23 seats held by the House GOP that went for Hillary Clinton, form an initial target list for Democrats. Don’t assume it will be easy: Republicans won most of those 33 districts by overwhelming margins against underwhelming Democrats.

That’s why Josh Stanfield, 30, was on hand at Tuesday’s event at York High School, looking for new blood for the local Democratic Party. Stanfield runs a PAC called Activate Virginia and is now recruiting candidates to run in Virginia’s legislative races this fall, hoping new grassroots supporters will do more than just heckle their congressman at a town hall.

“They’re not flooding the [Democratic] committees,” Stanfield said of the faces in the crowd. He wants to sign them up to work on legislative races and this year’s contest for governor — as well as congressional races next year and beyond, when he expects new Census numbers to produce a congressional map that is more favorable to Democrats.

“We’ll show you how to get involved,” Stanfield explained before Taylor’s town hall. Above all, he said there was one goal: “Get all these people to vote.”

Kim and Elizabeth Sholtis illustrate this conundrum. Kim Sholtis, 45, said she and her husband, who serves in the Air Force at nearby Joint Base Langley-Eustis, are registered to vote in his hometown outside of Harrisburg, Pa., under laws designed to help military members. They have not been engaged in local politics, but that changed after Sholtis woke up her daughter the morning the election to tell her Trump had won.

“I thought she was joking,” Elizabeth Sholtis, 17, recalled.

Neither mother nor daughter could recall anything about Taylor’s race in 2016. But they promise to be more engaged in 2018, when Elizabeth Sholtis will be eligible to vote and plans to oppose anyone on Trump’s side.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is determined not to repeat last year’s mistake. It has hired a full-time staffer to work in the Tidewater region to help with recruiting and local activism.

Taylor, aware that the next election will be different, scheduled three straight evenings of town halls this week to help his constituents get to know their new congressman. Before taking questions Tuesday, he counseled the audience to avoid chanting and shouting so that everyone could be heard.

“We’ve got to remain calm. Calm is contagious,” Taylor said.

He even suggested that local media coverage of Monday’s meeting had scared away some of his conservative supporters.

He then took more than 25 questions that ran the gamut — from the Obamacare repeal effort to Trump’s rhetorical assault on the media to his own views on deportation of illegal immigrants. While the crowd cheered and jeered at times, the questions, picked randomly by the hosts, were thoughtful and sometimes peppered with personal family anecdotes about struggles.

Taylor distanced himself from Trump’s most controversial positions. He dismissed as impractical building a wall along the entire Mexican border. He said Trump was “100 percent” wrong to call the media an “enemy of the American people.” He aligned himself on Russia policy with traditional hawks such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), Defense Secretary James N. Mattis and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly.

“I’m with Ryan. I’m with Mattis. I’m with Kelly,” Taylor said, drawing bipartisan cheers while pointedly leaving Trump off that list.

Taylor is a fairly doctrinaire conservative. He wants to devolve much of Medicaid to the states. He eagerly supports repealing the Affordable Care Act. He views the Dodd-Frank Act, which regulates Wall Street, as crippling to business interests. And he’s willing to support thousands of new border agents if Kelly recommends it.

Those positions drew the rowdiest opposition from an overwhelmingly anti-Trump crowd, but they are also positions that Republicans have long held while repeatedly winning elections. One question is whether they can continue to do so if Trump comes to be associated with that traditional Republican policy platform while also remaining unpopular. And one challenge for Republicans is to distance themselves from Trump’s controversies, which have less to do with policy and often relate to personal behavior and business dealings, to allow voters to differentiate between them and Trump.

Taylor seemed to understand that Tuesday. And by the end of the night, he had found at least one unlikely ally, Delphia Hedgepeth, 83, a Democrat who went to Washington last month for the Women’s March. She thanked him for at least showing up and facing the heat.

“He was willing to take the questions,” Hedgepeth said. “He didn’t make promises that he couldn’t fulfill.”