Coalitions, Great Debates, and the Suburbs
What does the future of suburban politics look like? How did the parties get their coalitions, and how are they changing? That's what I explore in this piece.
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Let us talk about the suburbs. In the Trump Era, Democrats made a lot of gains in suburbs across the country. From New York City and Philadelphia in the Northeast to Los Angeles and Phoenix in the Southwest, from Detroit, Chicago, and the Twin Cities in the Northern Midwest to Harris County in Texas (Houston) and the San Antonio-Austin Corridor in the Central South, and from Seattle, Portland and even Anchorage in the Northwest to Charlotte and Atlanta in the Southeast, Democrats gained congressional and state legislative seats by the dozens as they ran hard against an extremely unpopular Republican Party led by then-President Donald J. Trump. Democrats made massive, unprecedented gains in suburbs around the country that even stretched outside their traditional turf in the largest major Northeastern and Western metropolises and delved deep into ancestrally Republican suburban strongholds by winning seats in the suburbs of Columbia and Charleston in South Carolina, in Oklahoma City and Tulsa in Oklahoma, and even Salt Lake City in Utah – all Republican redoubts for more than a generation now.
The standard popular narrative for some time now has been that the “suburban realignment” is both something new and something temporary. A lot of analysts seem to expect some sort of so-called “suburban reversion” now that Trump is off the ballot. Because the great offender against suburban professionals is no longer in the news every single day, the thinking goes, there is no reason for the suburban professionals to keep voting for the center-left Party with which they largely disagree with on economic issues. It seems that in the popular pundit class, there is some sort of expectation that the suburban shift towards the Party of the New Deal is something “temporary” or “does not make sense”. These ideas are largely based on analyzing the Parties’ coalitions since the emergence of the Democratically dominated Fifth Party System in 1932. Frank DeStefano’s book The Realignment is a fascinating read, and I highly recommend anyone interested in Realignment Theory in the American context read it. The standard model of American history is that there have been six party systems between the institution of the Constitution in 1788 and 2016, and in each system, there was a unique coalition that powered each side of the “great debate”. A quick summary of these Party Systems is given below.
The First Party System ran 1788-1828 and was dominated by the Democratic-Republicans who fought against the Federalists, and the “great debate” (to use DeStefano’s words) in this period was essentially between strict constructionism of the Constitution (the Constitution is one of exhaustive enumerated powers; favored by Democratic-Republicans) and loose constructionism of the Constitution (the Constitution is one of unexhaustive enumerated powers; favored by Federalists). In terms of Party coalitions, the Federalists were usually dominant in the more industrialized and developed Northeast and had a strong base in the rising urban professional class while the Democratic-Republicans were usually dominant in the Southeast and had a strong base in the agrarian planter and worker classes.
The Second Party System ran 1828-1860 and was dominated by the Democrats who fought against the Whigs, and the “great debate” in this period was essentially between agrarian populism (focused on yeomen farmers working in a laissez-faire economic system free from government intervention; favored by the Democrats) and state-supported industrialization (using national banking corporations, for instance, to finance the expansion of railroads and other heavy industry; favored by the Whigs). In terms of Party coalitions, the Democrats dominated in the largely agrarian South and to a lesser extent in the prairies while the Whigs were dominant in the highly industrialized Northeast and the newly industrializing Midwest. The Democrats also had strong support among urban ethnic minorities, chiefly the Irish and other Catholics, because they were not allowed any presence in Northern cities’ Whig-dominated political machines. In fact, the ancestry of the Democrats being the Party of minorities dates to this era in the Second Party System where they were the political refuge for new immigrants from the fiercely Nativist Whigs who dominated the cities they lived in. Because the Whigs at this time controlled the nations’ urban areas, and as minorities flocked to urban areas, the only way they could register political opposition was by registering and voting with the opposition Democrats instead.
The Third Party System ran 1860-1896 and was dominated by Republicans who fought against the Democrats, and the “great debate” in this period, which came from the outgrowth of the Civil War, was essentially between the expansion of pluralistic democracy and civil rights (freedom from slavery and using the force of the federal government to mandate the enfranchisement of African-Americans; favored by Republicans) and a white backlash to the expansion of civil rights (favoring a weak federal government such that racist institutions such as Jim Crow could be built; favored by the Democrats). In terms of Party Coalitions, Republicans dominated the Northeast, Midwest, and Far West by legacy of their fierce opposition to slavery and old ties to the Whig political machines of industrialized cities. On the contrary, the Third (and forthcoming Fourth) Party System(s) were the heyday of the Democratic Solid South where populist resentment against both newly freed blacks and a powerful federal government tied the region to nearly unparalleled loyalty to the Democratic Party that would last for generations to come.
The Fourth Party System ran 1896-1932 and was also dominated by Republicans who fought against the Democrats, and the “great debate” in this period was essentially between (late-19th Century) Progressivism (favoring the use of academic expertise and technocracy to ameliorate the inequalities of industrialization; favored by Republicans) and (late-19th Century) Populism (using the power of the federal government to establish a basic standard of living for all within their agrarian lifestyle; favored by Democrats). In terms of Party coalitions, the Republicans continued to dominate the Northeast and Upper Midwest (what we would today consider the Rust Belt), but their control of the largest cities’ political machines began to decay, and the longstanding relationship that Northern Democrats had with urban ethnic minorities (i.e. Irish, Catholics, Poles, Italians, etc.) began to make significant progress in taking over these urban political machines, which heralded a new Populist movement that tied together the urban poor and agrarian forgotten-man to create a new Democratic Coalition based on Populist and redistributionist ideology. The Solid South remained the most staunchly Democratic region of the nation, but in the Fourth Party System, the Democrats, now embracing Populism, made significant inroads in the Far West and Great Plains states where the economic populism of wealth redistribution and distrust of Eastern Big Business (which dominated the Progressive Republican Party at the time) drove these voters into the open arms of the Democratic Party.
The Fifth Party System’s dating is up for debate; everyone agrees that it began in 1932 during the trauma of the Great Depression with the massive nationwide Democratic landslides up and down the ballot led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt where the nation repudiated the Republican Party in historical fashion and relegated them to the minority of governorships, the US House, state legislatures, and the US Senate for decades to come. However, there is debate about the ending of the Fifth Party System. Some argue that the Fifth Party System ended with Richard Nixon’s victory in 1968, and it definitely seemed that way after he won a massive nationwide landslide in his 1972 reelection. Watergate ended any discussion of this, though, with Democrat Jimmy Carter riding the Solid South and Midwestern union strength to victory in 1976.
Another proposed ending date is 1980 when Ronald Reagan leads Republicans back to the White House in a 44-state landslide and control of the US Senate for the first time since 1952. Still others, DeStefano included, believe that the Fifth Party System never ended and that we’re still living through it right now. The argument for this last point is made under the question of whether or not the “great debate” of the Fifth Party System was resolved. The “great debate” of the Fifth Party System was essentially between support for the New Deal (a strong, large federal government taking on previously unforeseen powers in order to regulate the economy to reduce the trauma of economic recession; favored by the Democrats) and opposition to the New Deal (distaste for an intrusive federal government and wanting to see its strength, size and power reduced greatly to prevent interference in the free market; favored by the Republicans). The Democrats dominated up and down the ballot during the Fifth Party System, and under the framework a lot of analysts use, Republicans dominated the Sixth Party System – but only at the presidential level. In fact, one of the reasons some analysts use to argue that there has been no Sixth Party System is that Republicans did not have domination up and down the ballot until the 2000s, and another is that even after the Reagan Revolution, the “great debate” remained centered on the power of government to shape the economy.
The Democratic Coalition that drove this party to nearly unparalleled political power in this period was the famous New Deal Coalition, composed of minorities (white ethnic minorities such as Italians, Poles, Catholics, etc. as well as black Americans in the North who worked in industrial, unionized jobs), urban centers (educated professionals and blue collar workers who lived in urban cores along with the urban poor and working classes; this is where Democrats finally defeat the old Whig urban political machines and become the party of the city), and economically disadvantaged whites (the agrarian classes of the white South along with the unionized industrial and blue collar workforces of the Midwest). This is also the time period when the Democratic Party becomes the Party of the labor union and the economically disadvantaged and when the Democratic Party took its definition in the nomenclature of the Western World’s Overton Window as being the “liberal” or “social democratic” Party in league with the UK’s Labour Party and Canada’s Liberal Party.
On the Republican side, the Party’s coalition continued to be powered by suburbs of major cities (especially those outside New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Dallas, etc.) along with a nascent culturally conservative movement that had come out of the throes of the Fall of Prohibition. During the Roaring Twenties and prior, the Republican Party, due to its Progressive tradition (using academic expertise to make the world a better place, i.e., using academic studies to show drinking and intoxication is bad for public health and then using a technocratic political process to ban it), had been the Party of Prohibition. While both Parties had wet and dry factions, the dry faction was much stronger in the Republican Party such that Republican President Herbert Hoover refused to endorse its repeal even after his own RNC Chairwoman pleaded that he do so.
On the other hand, during the trauma of the Great Depression, then-candidate Franklin Roosevelt ran on a promise of repealing constitutional Prohibition in order to increase tax revenue for greater public works, and as soon as he took office, he signed into law the Beer Permit Act, which repealed the most onerous restrictions of the infamous Volstead Act and allowed renewed popular sale and consumption of alcohol. Also, as soon as they could, the Democratic supermajorities in Congress repealed the 17th Amendment and sent it to the overwhelmingly Democratically controlled states to ratify the 21st Amendment. The moves on Prohibition by the parties in the 1920s and 1930s solidified the cultural images of both as the Republicans embraced a more moralistic and socially conservative as well as religious argument against alcohol while the Democrats instead tacked to a pragmatist and socially liberal as well as secularly libertarian argument in favor of alcohol.
Moving on to the Sixth Party System, as previously mentioned, there is some debate as to when it started. Some analysts and historians point to the 1968 presidential victory of Richard Nixon where he made significant inroads in the then-staunchly Democratic Deep South and Midwest by running on a platform in opposition to the social liberalism (and social chaos) of the 1950s and 1960s. However, I do not believe 1968 was the hallmark of the Sixth Party System because as much as Nixon created a new electoral map, outside his judicial appointments, he essentially governed as a New Deal Republican – the heir to Dwight D. Eisenhower if there ever was one.
He is the one who passed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts and set up the EPA and OSHA, significant government intrusions into the economy. Other analysts point to 1980 where Ronald Reagan led a revitalized Republican Party to landslide victory by embracing the anti-New Deal ideology of Barry Goldwater and embraced both cultural conservatism and small government ideology. Personally, I agree with the use of 1980 as the start of the Sixth Party System because we saw a significant rejection of the previous Party System’s fundamental underpinnings (the New Deal) and an ushering in of a new governing ideology. However, DeStefano and some others disagree and argue that there was no political realignment in mid-20th Century because for all intents and purposes, the two Parties were still having the same “great debate” about the New Deal and its associated liberalism, both social and economic.
The interesting thing here is that in the transition from the Fifth Party System to the Sixth Party System, the coalitions of the two Parties largely stayed the same. The Democrats, when they won, still relied on the New Deal Coalition of minorities, urban cores, and economically disadvantaged whites (especially blue collar union workers in the industrial Midwest), and the Republicans relied on what eventually came to be termed as Reagan’s Three-Legged Stool: neoliberals (anti-New Dealers and people who believed in “small government”), neoconservatives (hawkish and interventionist foreign policy), and paleoconservatives (religious and nativist conservatives, chiefly the Evangelical community). The only major shift between the two Parties in this transition in terms of their coalitions was the movement of neoconservatives from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.
In the 1920s and before, Republicans rejected intervention and pursued an “American First”, in the words of Charles Lindbergh, policy agenda that refused to be entangled in European or any foreign affairs, and Republicans in the Senate infamously forced the failure of interventionist Democratic President Woodrow Wilson’s Treaty of Versailles and League of Nations. On the other hand, the Democrats were deeply enmeshed with a neoconservative worldview that viewed it as the nation’s pre-ordained destiny to become a global great power with the ability to influence internal issues in other nations great and small. This was an outgrowth of the “Manifest Destiny” movement that embodied the Democratic Party from its very beginning with Andrew Jackson’s push into the Western Frontier, and the party viewed as the nation’s destiny to conquer the world in similar fashion.
Continuing that legacy, the Democratic Party waged and won two world wars at the turn of the 20th Century, and neoconservative interventionists found a home in the Party. However, by the 1960s, the more civil libertarian wing of the Party (largely led by younger urbanites and minorities) began to reject neoconservatism as they saw the Party’s entanglement in the ultimate quagmire of Vietnam lead to military chaos and domestic division. This then pushed the neoconservatives to the Republican Party where Ronald Reagan was able to use their fiercely pro-intervention and anti-USSR sentiment to merge it with the cultural conservatism building in the Party among its Christian base and the neoliberal (i.e., small government and fiscally conservative) suburbanite strongholds.
Of course, those of us living through this era will never know if we are in the Fifth Party System, the Sixth Party System, or even the Seventh Party System (as I believe we have entered in 2020); this will be the topic which historians in the coming decades will have to debate and come to a consensus on that we currently are unable to achieve. Regardless, the context here is interesting and important when we talk about the suburbs and their blueshift under Trump because when we talk about any realignment, we are actually talking about the Parties’ coalitions. With the suburban defection to Democrats, the Party of the New Deal and government expansion, in the Trump Era, there is great question about the future of the Parties’ coalitions.
Specifically, where will affluent suburbanites end up once the dust from the Trump Era settles and the Parties settle into their new coalitions? Will they vote their cultural interest and embrace the socially liberal Party of the New Deal that rejected Prohibition and opened its arms to the downtrodden and oppressed during the Civil Rights Era? Or will they vote their economic interest and return to the socially conservative Party of Ronald Reagan that embraced a pietistic, moralistic case against alcohol and which currently embraces an orthodox interpretation of their Christian religious texts and attempts to force Christian paleoconservatism onto the nation? The answer to this is, of course, up in the air, but if we look at history, there are some clues, and I will give my predictions and best estimates.
First of all, we need to dispel one notion right off the bat: The suburbs did not start shifting blue post-2016. In fact, the suburbs began moving blue back in the 1950s as the Republican Party first started to be taken over by Taft conservatives. One of the first examples of a suburban shift towards the Democratic Party is John F. Kennedy’s 1952 defeat of Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. to the Class I US Senate seat in Massachusetts. While the suburban counties outside Boston remained red and voted for Lodge, Kennedy kept them extremely close, holding Lodge to a 0.21-point victory in Essex County and a 0.72-point victory in Middlesex County. To put that in perspective, in 1946, Lodge won Essex by 25 points and Middlesex by 29 points.
The parts of these counties that shifted blue the most from 1946 to 1952 were those closest to Boston. As the nation’s oldest major city (dating back to the early 1600s), Boston has been for a long time, and remains, a hub of liberal thought. This is the place where the nation’s first university was chartered; this is the place where they embraced the ideals of John Locke and overthrew a monarchy; the is the place where they embraced industrialization and all the societal change it would unleash; this is the place where they proudly took on and fought for abolition; this is the place where ethnic minorities found refuge from nativists in the Deep South; and this is the place that once upon a time rejected Prohibition.
Liberalism has a long history of being practiced by the educated population, and this goes all the way back to Isaac Newton’s days. Given that Greater Boston even then was the home of the largest concentration of universities and college degree holders, they were among the first suburbanites who shook off the traditional distaste that suburbanites had against their parent city and instead embraced Boston as an economic engine powering the whole state. The cultural and social conservativism that was rising in the Republican Party even back in the 1950s as the Deep South showed rumblings of defection over Brown v. Board of Education also seemed to turn off the highly educated and affluent urbanites and suburbanites of Greater Boston.
There was also a shift in economic ideology among Boston suburbanites. While Massachusetts, and especially the suburbs of Boston, were extremely distasteful of the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s, by the 1950s, the Boston suburbs (and the parent city) rallied around the New Deal. The New Deal set the stage for the expansion of higher education as the Democratic Party passed laws like the GI Bill after World War II to provide for the development of a fully educated workforce and funneled more federal cash to the building of new land grant universities and expansion of existing universities around the nation.
One of the core tenets of New Deal liberalism was actually quite Progressive in tradition (referring to the late-19th Century and early-20th Century Progressivism, i.e., technocracy); it involved taking academics and other experts in whatever appropriate field and utilizing them in a political process to better society. The alphabet programs of the First New Deal in particular are very much rooted in a very technocratic Progressivism that was embraced at the turn of the 20th Century. The creation of the National Labor Relations Board, for instance, is the quintessential example of this; economists and labor experts, largely academics by training, were hired by the federal government (appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate) to use their technocratic expertise to both nurture and organize a national labor force. Another example is the Agricultural Adjustment Agency, which was a group of technocrats (again, largely economists) who were hired by the federal governments to ease the economic pain felt by farmers; they used their economic and agricultural knowhow to calculate the extent of over-production and then used their statutorily granted regulatory power to limit the production of certain products and artificially increase the price by spending their budget to limit that production by paying farmers not to produce.
This Progressive (i.e., technocratic) New Deal brought great windfall to the Greater Boston economy because even back in the 1930s, Boston had the largest number of universities and was home to the greatest concentration of college degree holders, and a lot of Greater Bostonians were employed by the federal government and New Deal agencies, which naturally caused these people to support the New Deal because their lives and livelihoods literally depended on it. A new sense of communitarianism began to develop culturally among these affluent “suburbanites” of Greater Boston, and it started to appreciate and utilize the New Deal more aggressively.
As such, the affluent suburbanites slowly moved into the Party of the New Deal even though their economic self-interest would have been better served by the Party opposing the New Deal due to lower taxes from the other side. There was a growing sense of “I’m willing to pay an extra few bucks in taxes if it means that the New Deal, which my job depends on, can survive”, and while this began in the stronghold of Boston proper, it eventually expanded outwards. Eventually, this Democratic support of the New Deal came to be embraced by those who lived outside Boston proper, too, and the suburbs of Boston were really the first in the nation to shed their Republican heritage and become Democratic. There is a shift in political sentiment that drives this.
In essence, what the thinking of the popular pundit class right now is that affluent suburbanites support the Democrats on their cultural policies (those of “leave me alone to do what I want with my bodies” libertarianism), but they do not support the pro-New Deal, anti-government economic ideology of the Democrats. Similarly, union country in the Midwest tended to vote Democratic for decades, up through even the mid-2010s, because they agreed with the Democrats’ New Deal, pro-government economic policies while disagreeing with the Democrats and agreeing with the Republicans’ social policies of using government authority to police individual autonomy. In general, the economically disadvantaged were voting in favor of their economic interests and against their cultural interests when they voted for Democrats while the economically affluent were also voting in favor of their economic interests and against their cultural interests when they voted for Republicans – hence the idea that the Parties for a long time now have been “economic coalitions”.
Really, the Parties for the last several decades (really since the fall of Prohibition) have been having two simultaneous debates, one about the New Deal and one about cultural liberalism. For a long, long time, the actual politics and political fights were about the debate on the New Deal, and they argued and quarreled over the extent to which the government should be allowed to intervene in the market. However, underneath the New Deal debate, the Parties have also had a subtler debate about cultural liberalism that has been raging since the end of Prohibition.
The Democrats since then have been pushing for individual and civil liberties unmoored from religious tradition. Another step in this direction was by President Harry Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces, which further galvanized the cause of individual and civil rights and moved Northern African-Americans into the 85%+ Democratic voting bloc they are today (FDR scored ~75% of Northern African-Americans in his last three elections). Yet another step was taken in this path towards social liberalism focusing on individual civil rights through the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 under President Lyndon Baines Johnson (which made African-Americans the immovable bedrock of the Democratic Party nationwide) and then the Immigration and Nationality Act, also signed by President Johnson, that greatly increased the number of allowed immigrants.
Even another step was taken in this path towards social liberalism unmoored by pietistic thought when Bill Clinton embraced the votes of gay Americans and tried (but failed) to repeal the military’s ban on only gay servicemembers. He took another step towards cultural liberalism when he staked the ground of his Party being as opposed to unleashed individual gun violence and against the National Rifle Association in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. Yet another step was taken towards the path of secular, social liberalism after Barack Obama, the nation’s first black President (a Democrat, no less) came out in support of gay marriage in the leadup to the 2012 presidential election, eventually expressed doubts about the death penalty, and took a harsh and determined stand against the NRA, similar to President Clinton, in the aftermath of multiple mass shooting during this term.
Then, in the leadup to the 2020 election, Joe Biden embraced the trans community as the group needing civil rights protections the most today. The Democratic Party has been moving in a more secular and socially liberal manner for a long, long time now without once sacrificing its New Deal economic ideology even if they had to moderate or slightly modify some New Deal positions. The Party embraced social liberalism early on with the fall of Prohibition, and through conscious choices made by its leaders to embrace a secularized social policy favoring the rights of the under-represented while still maintaining their adherence to the New Deal, the Democratic Party today has fully embraced the cause of cultural liberalism and married it to its traditional century-long support of an interventionist government.
On the other hand, after the fall of Prohibition, Republicans began to consolidate the religious and culturally conservative vote just as the Democrats began to consolidate the secular and socially liberal vote. The fall of Prohibition was one small push into the Republican Party of this demographic, and indeed, culturally conservative voters in rural southwestern and central Virginia and western North Carolina began voting for Republican candidates as early as the 1930s after FDR signed the Beer Permit Act. Another step was taken by Dwight D. Eisenhower expressing his distaste for his decision to appoint liberal jurists Earn Warren and William Brennan to the US Supreme Court, which drew a more religious audience to his Republican Party.
Yet another point of social conservatives and religious conservatives moving towards Republicans happened when Richard Nixon masterfully utilized his “law and order” and “states’ rights” message to mobilize the so-called “Silent Majority” to win the White House. Another move was when Nixon and his campaign team exercised the Southern Strategy to break the Democrats’ hold on the Solid South through racist appeals via dog whistles to culturally conservative whites. And the next move was Ronald Reagan weaponizing the issues of abortion, guns, religion, and other cultural conservative touchstones to take the religious Christian vote into his Party’s coalition and drive the three Republican landslides of the 1980s. Another move that solidified the pietistic social conservatism of the Republican Party was George W. Bush’s anti-gay marriage agenda in the mid-2000s. Finally, of course, Donald Trump’s appeals to nativism and religious rule essentially wrapped up the cultural conservative movement into the Republican Party. However, through all of these moves, even though the voting base of the Republican Party became extremely socially conservative, the “official ideology” was still opposition to government and the New Deal.
At this point, post-2016, both the New Deal Coalition and the Three-Legged Stool are torn apart. This is because these coalitions were economic coalitions, but these days, voters are not really caring all that much about the economic debate; they are mostly caring about the cultural debate. As such, the economic debate has been subsumed by the cultural debate, and the two Parties are no longer interested in rehashing the New Deal because their voters fundamentally don’t care about the New Deal anymore. For all intents and purposes, one of the two debates launched in 1932, the economic debate, has been resolved, and the American electorate is happy with the welfare state it currently has with the controls currently in place for the most part.
However, this has left the second debate, the cultural debate, unresolved. To be fair, the main reason this debate was not resolved was because the nation was still grappling over the economic debate; the nation was still fighting over the full extent of the New Deal which they wanted to maintain. As such, the Parties’ only really cared about their economic agendas. However, with the New Deal debate now resolved, the two Parties’ cultural positions are now front and center, issues such as abortion, guns, LGBTQIA+ rights, social justice, racial justice, sexual autonomy, and all the rest. The two Parties are just now, post-2016, fully embracing what their cultural positions actually are because up until now, it did not actually matter what either Party really thought on cultural issues because the debate which everyone was still having was the New Deal Debate. But this is no longer the case post-2016.
This is also why there are next to no pro-choice Republicans left and why where are next to no pro-life Democrats left. Now that the two Parties are no longer fighting over the extent of the New Deal, they need to find a new “great debate” to have, and it is the debate over social liberalism and the extent of popular rejection of religious doctrine. As the “great debate” changed, the Parties’ positions have changed as well. Now, both Parties largely accept that the New Deal (and the Great Society for that matter) are all but untouchable. Republicans can fight about slashing government all they want, but in the time they have had power, they have never done it because the American electorate is happy with the welfare state built by the New Deal and Great Society and do not want to see it abolished. Every time Republicans have tried to roll back the welfare state, the electorate punished them at the polls and took away their right to govern because the electorate is happy with the New Deal and Great Society as it currently stands.
Similarly, Democrats have been trying to create new government programs from scratch in the technocratic New Deal legacy, but every time they tried (healthcare overhauls with a new “alphabet soup” agency in the 1990s just like the New Deal agencies), the electorate has revolted and prevented then from doing so. We are at the point that the New Deal and Great Society have reached the greatest extent allowable as given command by the electorate. This is also the reason that even the Democratic push to get to single payer universal healthcare has stopped trying to create a new system from scratch like other Western nations like Canada, the UK, and France did when they created and adopted their single payer systems.
Rather, the Democrats who are pushing for single payer have instead accepted that the electorate is no longer interested in the creation of a new bureaucratic agency that would centrally administer in a very technocratic manner the minutiae of getting healthcare to all 335 million Americans. They have instead changed their strategy to working within the Great Society’s existing framework; this is why the policy “Medicare for All” is so salient, especially as a campaign issue. While Americans have said they are no longer interested in the creation of large bureaucratic agencies, they have tolerated (and even encouraged) the modification of existing Great Society and New Deal programs; they just do not want them abolished as anti-government Republicans want or want them complemented with new such programs as pro-New Deal Democrats would want. Medicare for All is not really an expansion of the New Deal in that sense because it does not involve the creation of a new bureaucracy and such related federal agency to administer it; rather, it uses the existing Great Society infrastructure to achieve a new policy goal.
What does this all have to do with the suburbs? The shifting of the “great debate” from economic issues to cultural issues has caused political alliances to fray and break apart. It is difficult to say which came first, but cultural polarization and negative partisanship go hand in hand with one feeding the other in a vicious feedback loop. It has been known for decades (perhaps centuries) that the more educated you are, the more affluent you are, and the more liberal you are on social issues. There is a direct correlation between these phenomena.
Naturally, the suburbs have been extremely educated for a long time now as this is the place where the wealthy and well-to-do who could afford a single family house in a cul-de-sac and a car for each working adult to commute into work everyday choose to live. This affluence usually caused the suburbs to support the party which lowered taxes and opposed government expansion. However, in democracies around the world, an alliance was made at the turn of the 20th century which I alluded to earlier. Conservative parties around the world created a coalition between the economically affluent and the religiously conservative in order to win elections, and liberal parties around the world created a coalition between the economically disadvantaged and the secular professionals in order to win elections. This has been documented in nations as far flung as Australia and France as well as those whose democracies are extremely old such as the Untied States and United Kingdom and those whose democracies are extremely young such as India and Malaysia.
There has been a global movement left of the educated professional class over the last several decades, something which Evan Scrimshaw has done a great job of noting and which Thomas Piketty has researched extensively and written about. Essentially, the rightwing parties used to be the party of the “Elites”, and the leftwing parties used to be the home of the economically disadvantaged. However, in all cases, it required some uncomfortable alliances. If we focus on Republicans for the moment, the alliance between affluent suburbanites and Christian conservatives is clearly a contradiction. Christian conservatives want to use the power of the state in order to enforce their code of religious morality on the rest of us through the force of law while affluent suburbanites have a “live and let live” philosophy that includes both tax policy and bodily autonomy free from government intervention. This was and is a very unstable alliance. For the Democrats, the alliance between the economically disadvantaged rural whites and secular urbanites was almost just as much of a contradiction. Those who are economically disadvantaged in general oppose things like immigration or free trade due to economic competition while secular urbanites in general embrace a cosmopolitan worldview that embraces diversity and pluralism. This same pattern is repeated all over the world (India’s INC v. BJP and their policy differences for instance). Eventually, the instability of these coalitions causes them to collapse. I talked briefly about the collapse of these coalitions in my redistricting piece:
After the Democratic Party took an unabashed cultural left turn by nominating and then electing the nation’s first black president in Barack Obama while embracing a multicultural nation and members of the LGBTQIA+ community, though, the days of the rural areas being the “swing areas” were over. Since then, rural whites have been voting solely their cultural interests and moved solidly into the Republican Party post-2010. The first party to fully lose its “opposite wing” due to cultural polarization that has afflicted the nation since the 1960s was the Democratic Party. As the Democratic Party became the party of cultural liberals, economically disadvantaged but culturally conservative whites left the party and voted with the party that more closely aligned with their cultural values. Until the election of Barack Obama, culturally conservative but economically disadvantaged whites were willing to vote against their cultural interests in favor of their economic interests – until 2010.
However, affluent suburbanites had continued to vote their economic interest and stuck with the Republican Party at this point, which necessarily meant that they were voting against their cultural interests – until 2018. Just as the Democratic Party took an unabashed cultural left turn by nominating and then electing the nation’s first black president in 2008, the Republican Party took an unabashed cultural right turn by nominating and then electing the obsessively anti-immigration, anti-abortion, anti-affirmative action, and anti-gun control Donald Trump as president. With this, the same thing that happened to the Democrats in 2010 happened to the Republicans in 2018. Until the election of Donald Trump, culturally liberal but affluent suburbanites were willing to vote against their cultural interests in favor of their economic interests – until 2018. This then caused the Republicans to also lose their “opposite wing” due to cultural polarization; it took longer to hit the Republican Party than the Democratic Party, but not much longer.
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As a nation, Americans are no longer willing to vote for their economic self-interest; they are only interested in voting for their cultural self-interest. At this point, the affluent suburbanite who lives in Edgeworth, PA (the wealthiest town in Pennsylvania and an inner-ring suburb of Pittsburgh in northern Allegheny County) is willing to pay a little more in taxes if it means that their gay neighbor does not get acid thrown at their face when they hold hands with their partner in public, and the poor white ex-industrial worker who lives in Forward Township, PA (one of the poorest towns in Pennsylvania and an industrial exurb on the southern tip of Allegheny County) is willing to accept a smaller pension check if it means that they can shut down the southern border and see a “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the country”. Whether this is good or bad is not something I will talk further about in this piece, for that is a discussion for a different day.
This all begs a question: Why would people of economic affluence vote to necessarily increase their own taxes and financially hurt themselves? There have been a lot of studies done about this, and the consensus seems to essentially be along the lines of, “At some point, I would rather pay higher taxes and have a functioning government to keep me safe than not have one at all.” I am reminded of something a friend of mine who is a Chicago businessman once told me. He headquartered his company in Chicago, and the city and the state of Illinois are infamous for their high tax rates, especially for corporations. Meanwhile, next door Indiana loves to advertise its infamously low tax rates to poach off business and economic activity from Illinois. I asked him why he did not take the bait:
At some point, it will always be cheaper for me to pay a little more in taxes in Chicago and have the city government clean the roads after every snowstorm than it would be for me to move to Indiana and have to buy my own snowplows and pay overtime to hire drivers to come in and clean out our private roads in dangerous weather. It’s also always going to be cheaper for me to pay an employee to fly out of O’Hare [International Airport] on a direct flight to the final destination than to pay an employee the rental car fee to have them drive to O’Hare or buy a connecting flight to O’Hare. The savings in taxes simply don’t add up to the savings from access to high quality infrastructure, and I’ve had my guys run the numbers on it. It’s literally cheaper for me to pay higher taxes here in Illinois and get all the public services I need than it would be for me to move to Indiana and pay lower taxes but be forced to take care of everything myself.
This is essentially the mentality of a lot of formerly neoliberal affluent suburbanites who now vote for the Democratic Party. The nation has reached a point where the tax burden is so low that even more tax cuts from Republicans is of no utility to a lot of suburbanites; as such, the economic incentive to stay loyal to the rightwing party is no longer there. Personally, I grew up and still live in a suburb outside of Pittsburgh, and I can attest to this. For a while I lived in a red state, and I experienced this all firsthand. Without divulging too much detail, I used to live in a city in northwest/north-central Indiana.
Whenever we would get hit with a snowstorm that dumped a mere 2-3 inches of snow on the ground, it would take the local government up to a week to clear the roads and sidewalks. In that time, it would be extremely hard to travel or even get to work because of how bad the roads were. When they finally did clear everything out, there would be another snowstorm the day after, and the same thing would happen again, meaning I had a hard time getting to work for another week. This would happen repeatedly every winter, and I have lost count of how many times I just took days off work or worked from home in frustration when I lived out there. Sure, I was paying very little in taxes, but I was also having to live within and among ailing infrastructure that had a hard time meeting the basic needs of First World Society.
Having grown up in Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, in a very wealthy state and county with high taxes, this drove me crazy. We used to get the same types of blizzards in Pittsburgh, but I had never had that experience of having to wait days on end for the snow to be cleared by the local government so that I could just go about my daily life. In all my two decades of living in Pittsburgh, there was only one time when it took the government more than an hour after a snowstorm ended for the roads to be cleared, and the one time it took longer was in February 2010 when two back-to-back massive nor’easters dumped something like three feet of snow on the ground. Other than that anomalous instance, I have never waited for a long time to see my roads in Pittsburgh cleared.
Living in Indiana gave me an appreciation for what it means to have a functioning and fully funded government that I had never had before. For my whole life, I had just taken it for granted that the roads would be clear after every snowstorm, but until I had to live in Indiana for some time, I did not realize how even that is a marker of privilege. Since then, I have developed a very different attitude, and it is something my father told me years ago but which I had not fully come to appreciate until I moved to Indiana, “I don’t mind if the government needs and takes more of my money; I just want to know that they’re using it to help society.” These days, I have the exact same mentality, and based on the political science research, it seems that psyche has been expanded across the suburbs of this nation.
With all this in mind, the economic motivation for affluent suburbanites to stay in the Republican Party has long since vanished. Our governments are so underfunded these days due to constant slashing of taxes by Republicans that we are running a nearly $30 trillion national debt; state and local governments are slashing funding for schools, universities, emergency services, healthcare subsidies, and more; and municipalities around the nation in all states have been dissolved and lost their cityhood because they can no longer provide basic services. We have reached a point of government destruction due to Republican policy that even the most basic public services such as clearing the roads of snow is now a difficult task that can take days to complete. It makes complete sense that the most educated people and the ones who need access to transportation infrastructure the most due to their jobs are the ones who are no longer willing to support the party of low taxes. The economic justification for affluent suburbanites to stay loyal to the party of low taxes is just no longer a point of contention.
This is not the only motivator of affluent suburbanites moving blue, though. In order to win elections, affluent suburbanites made a bargain with Christian and rural conservatives such that they would all support the same candidates, and those candidates would focus on removing government from the economy and private life. However, as the culture war intensified in the 1980s and 1990s, this no longer became tenable. Steve Kornacki’s book The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism is an absolutely fascinating book where he describes how over the course of the 1990s in particular, there was an awakening of the affluent suburbanites to the consequences of that bargain. The entire book is a fascinating read, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in how we became so politically polarized and divided as a nation. His description of the transformation of the culture war in the 1990s is truly illuminating.
In the 1994 red wave, Republicans won control of both chambers of Congress for the first time since 1952 on a platform developed by Newt Gingrich, the “Contract with America”. The “Contract” included all sorts of Republican pet projects such as abolishing welfare, accelerated defense spending, abridgement of entitlements, and so much more. Essentially, all the pent-up frustration of small-government conservative Republicans that had been building up over the previous six decades finally reared its ugly head. With Republicans in control of Congress and actually able to pass laws of their preference for the first time in decades, a lot of Americans, especially suburbanites, saw the Republican cultural agenda for almost the first time in their lives. As long as Republicans were checked by a Democratic House, for all intents and purposes, it did not really matter what the social and cultural agenda of the party was because it was not going to get a hearing anyway. However, with the Gingrich agenda front and center for the whole nation to see, the suburbs started recoiling as they aggressively pursued their cultural agenda.
One of the most infamous culture war battles waged by the Gingrich Republicans was over financial assistance to poor families with children. While there had been great rhetorical support for the abridgement (even abolition) of welfare in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Gingrich Republicans actually wrote their legislation and tried to pass it, they pressed on a “compassion nerve” (Kornacki’s description) of the electorate. Gingrich proposed to block grant the Assistance for Families with Dependent Children program (one of the key Great Society welfare programs in place at the time) and send it back to the states in order to save money. The money saved could then be used to fund orphanages, according to him. The electorate erupted: “With that, he gave Democrats an opening they’d never expected. The term ‘orphanage’, for most Americans, conjured grim Dickensian despair. And Newt wanted to send more kids to live in them? The criticism rained down, with Hillary Clinton calling the idea ‘unbelievable and absurd’” (Kornacki 303-304). According to polling, almost 80% of the electorate, including supermajorities of affluent suburbanites, disapproved of the plan to send more kids to orphanages.
Another culture war battle waged by the Gingrich Republicans was over the school breakfast and lunch program. Again in the name of cutting welfare and cutting off the “welfare queens” (a longtime culture war battle dreamed of by Reagan Republicans), Gingrich proposed to block grant the entire school meal program and send that back to the states, too, but not only that, he proposed to actually cut funding going forward for the program. Needless to say, as soon as the news was announced, Democrats and the nation at large revolted:
Democrats erupted. The school lunch program was a lifeline to millions, they argued, and it was working just fine. Blowing it up and block-granting it ‘would really take food out o the mouths of millions of needy schoolchildren,’ White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta charged. Words like ‘unconscionable’, ‘draconian’, and ‘absolutely insane’ were tossed around… [T]he furor over school lunches now overwhelmed the coverage, with Republicans left pleading that they weren’t trying to deprive hungry kids of breakfast and lunch. (Kornacki 305)
The culture war battles did not end there, though. In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the nation turned its eyes against the Far-Right anti-government movement that had been brewing and festering for decades on the periphery of society. The incident of domestic terrorism put a spotlight on the excesses of conservative talk radio, especially that of Rush Limbaugh, wherein the hosts regularly and routinely not just criticized but vilified the federal government and law enforcement agents. The nation (and affluent suburbanites in particular) did not realize the new coalition that they had become part of under the banner of the Republican Party and the bargain that they had accepted to do so:
In the Republican Party of yesteryear, there were as many Rockefeller liberals from the Northeast as Taft conservatives from the Midwest. This ascendant iteration, though, was ideologically conservative and found its center of power below the Mason-Dixon line. It had nurtured new alliances on the right side of the spectrum, from freshly mobilized evangelical Christians to increasingly strident gun groups, giving rise to a powerful political coalition. It had been happening slowly, steadily for decades, out of view of many Americans. Now, with Gingrich wielding the Speaker’s gavel, it was in everyone’s face. (Kornacki 309)
The Oklahoma City terrorist attack also put a national spotlight for the first time on what had become an intensely conservative, pro-gun, and radical National Rifle Association. The NRA had made it its mission to get the assaults weapons ban and the Brady Bill repealed as soon as Republicans took control of Congress, but President Bill Clinton made it clear that it would not happen. Communication from Gingrich to the NRA’s leadership was leaked where he promised that as long as he was Speaker, there would be no gun control legislation considered in committee let alone get a floor vote, and as soon as this was revealed, President Clinton’s team made sure everyone in America knew and heard of this promise.
In one of his speeches after the bombing, President Clinton said, “We hear so many loud and angry voices in American today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all tore up and upset with each other. They spread hate.” Limbaugh fired back on his show, “Make no mistake about it, liberals intend to use this tragedy for their own political gain.” Returning to Kornacki, “But there were also millions of Americans who’d never listened and who were alarmed by what they were now hearing. To them, the president’s words sounded plenty reasonable” (311-312). Americans, especially affluent and educated suburbanites, were seeing for the first time the actual fruit of the bargain they had made in order to stay under the Republican banner with cultural conservatives.
Republicans continued the radical actions through the 90s, and I cannot enumerate all of them here. I will just end with one more example about Medicare. After President Clinton offered to slow the growth of Medicare spending by $124 billion over a decade while making no changes to the services covered in order to balance the budget, the Republicans came back with a counteroffer of an omnibus bill that would extract $270 billion from Medicare and then cut taxes for the wealthy by $245 billion in addition for a total of $515 billion transferred from the elderly to the wealthy.
Especially for suburbanites who were used to seeing their parents and grandparents have fully covered healthcare and be able to live in some peace because of it (and who expected to be able to avail of this themselves upon retirement), this was a massive outrage, and the electorate once again revolted against the Gingrich Republicans. Things got so bad and the Republican position so radical that the Republicans forced multiple government shutdowns in order to pare back Medicare in their ultimate culture war quest of “getting the government out of our lives”. To his credit, President Clinton never once budged, and the electorate squarely blamed Gingrich and the Republicans with approval ratings for both reaching the thirties during the shutdown fiascos while Democrats’ and President Clinton’s approval ratings stayed positive. President Clinton and Democrats got their political reward through continued electoral victories in 1996, 1998, and 2000.
In pursuit of their culture war, culturally conservative Republicans led by Gingrich drove a wedge between the two core wings of the Republican Party: the affluent suburbanites who voted on taxes and the paleoconservatives who voted on social issues. Democrats led by President Clinton capitalized on this and used the multiple culture war battles of the 1990s over orphanages, school lunches, Medicare, guns, and even talk radio to cleave off at least some suburbanites from the Republican Party. They would find their fruit in the 1996 presidential election. Clinton won states this time that he had largely already won in 1992, but the shifts underneath were absolutely fascinating:
If you just looked at those numbers, you might think the 1996 election ended up as more or less a repeat of 1992. The electoral count was almost the same (it had been 370–168 the last time), and Clinton’s popular-vote margin wasn’t much bigger this time—eight points now, compared to 5.5 in ’92. But a closer look told a story of new divisions. Clinton’s improvements were not evenly spread out. Overall, his popular-vote margin had grown by two and a half points, but in some places the increase was bigger than others—a lot bigger. In particular, there was the Northeast. In ’92, Clinton had carried New York by sixteen points. This time he won it by twenty-nine. New Jersey had gone for Clinton by just two points in ’92. Now, his number exploded to eighteen. Connecticut went from seven points in ’92 to eighteen in ’96. Massachusetts went from eighteen to thirty-three, New Hampshire from two to ten.
The suburbs of the Northeast, packed with culturally moderate white-collar professionals, had traditionally been a source of strength for Republicans. But presented with the Republican Party of Newt Gingrich, they were recoiling. Was this the same party they’d been voting for all those years? It could be seen in other spots on the map, too, and among women, it was especially pronounced. Four years earlier, Clinton had won male voters by three points and females by seven; now he lost men by a point—and won women by seventeen. ‘Angry White Males’ had been the catchall term pundits used to describe the voters at the heart of the Republican Revolution. Now, the same pundits chalked up Clinton’s reelection to the rise of ‘Soccer Moms.’ (Kornacki 352)
The suburban blueshift began decades prior to Trump. It actually began in Greater Boston in the 1950s. In fact, it accelerated through New England’s secular, educated suburbs well before the rest of the nation. Another example of this suburban shift is the political transformation of the state of Vermont. From the founding of the Democratic Party in 1828 until 1992, the Green Mountain state voted for the Democrats’ opponent (Whigs and Republicans) at the presidential level in every single election, except for one in 1964’s nationwide Democratic landslide by President Lyndon Johnson over the archconservative Barry Goldwater. Yes, you read that right; for almost 170 years, the state of Vermont rejected the Democratic Party so profoundly that it was one of only two states, along with Maine, that rejected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during all four of his presidential elections.
However, when the Republican Party began to be taken over by archconservatives, especially indicated by Goldwater’s nomination in 1964, the state revolted, and this would set the stage for the political transformation of Vermont from a staunch Republican redoubt to the steadfast Democratic stronghold it is famous for being today. From the explosion of the Boston and New York City metropolises (i.e., suburbs) in Vermont in the postwar era, a political transformation began in the 1950s as the state took in more and more educated, affluent commuters from Greater Boston and Greater New York City. In the following table and graph, we can see the raw margin and margin relative to the nation of presidential elections in Vermont from 1932 onwards (positive means Democratic; negative means Republican).
We can see that before staunch conservatives take over the Republican Party (in the 1980s), the state is not just staunchly Republican, it is more Republican than the nation regularly. However, the first anomaly happens in 1964 when Vermont is ten points more Democratic than the nation at large, and the big reason for this is that the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, was seen as a conservative extremist in the Northeast in particular. After Republicans nominate more relatively mainstream candidates for the three elections afterwards, it returns to its heritage, but starting with the Reagan-led Southern takeover of the Republican Party, the state revolts against its historic Republican heritage. Starting in 1980, Vermont, now essentially an extension of the New York City and Boston metropolises, is more Democratic than the nation every time, and these days, Vermont is so Democratic that it elects the nation’s only self-described socialist to federal office by landslides every election.
We can see this affluent suburban revolt against the Republican Party around the nation. Below, I show the evolution in raw margins of various suburban counties around the nation from 1952 to present day: Westchester County, NY (New York City); Montgomery County, PA (Philadelphia); Middlesex County, MA (Boston); Ventura County, CA (Los Angeles); Orange County, CA (Los Angeles); Arapahoe County, CO (Denver); DeKalb County, IL (Chicago); Oakland County, MI (Detroit); Delaware County, OH (Columbus); Loudoun County, VA (Washington, DC); Gwinnett County, GA (Atlanta); Hays County, TX (Austin); and Cabarrus County, NC (Charlotte). It should be noted that these are just raw margins, not relative to the nation, so the 1964 Democratic landslide needs to be taken particular note of, and the vestiges of the Solid South in Texas and Georgia in the early part of this period also must be kept in mind.
I also broke these graphs up by region so that we can see regional trends as well. Though suburbs across the country started moving blue in the 1980s (Massachusetts and Boston being an exception which had an even further head start), the time at which Democrats became competitive (and winning) them is different. In the Northeast and Far West, Democrats begin winning the suburbs regularly in the 1990s. In the Midwest, and Northern Virginia, they start winning them in the late-2000s. In the South, they start winning suburbs in the late-2010s. Given the ancestral liberalism or conservatism of each region, it is understandable while there is a staggered transformation from red to blue; for instance, the Northeast is the most liberal region of the nation and moved blue first because of it while the South is the most conservative region of the nation and moved blue last because of it. By the presidential election of 2000, suburbs in the Northeast and Far West become lean Democratic:
In the Northeast, Gore was swamping Bush: by sixteen points in New Jersey, twenty-five in New York, pushing thirty in Massachusetts. On their screens, viewers saw a virtually uninterrupted blue blob from Washington, D.C., north through Maine; another one in the upper Midwest, where Gore claimed Illinois easily and Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin with great effort; and one more streak of blue along the Pacific Coast, stretching from Seattle to San Diego.
The states in these blue areas shared some characteristics. Most had large cities with diverse populations. The political clout of nonwhites was growing; they now accounted for almost one in five voters, and they were breaking for Gore at a 76 percent clip.
There were densely packed suburbs and metropolitan areas, where college degrees, white-collar jobs, and liberal cultural values were now the norm. These were voters who’d reacted with such hostility to the Gingrich Congress, and even though Newt was gone now, they weren’t buying the GOP’s Bush makeover. (Kornacki 419-420)
While it may not be uniform, there is a noticeable positive trendline in this sampling of suburban counties around the nation. We can clearly see that the suburbs began shifting blue across the nation roughly around the 1980s, and this makes sense as well because the 1980s is when the Reagan campaigns showed to affluent suburbanites what the bargain they had made was. As more and more suburbanites recognized that their alliance included radicals such as those who wanted to eliminate Medicare and the school lunch program as well a radical NRA and devout Christians, they began having second thoughts about their partisan loyalties.
For a long time, the suburbs were Republican because suburban voters wanted lower taxes and limited government. However, since the 1950s in Boston and the 1980s in the rest of the country, the suburbs have been moving blue as the neoliberalism of the suburbanites became increasingly at odds with the rising power of the Christian conservatives who were taking over the Republican Party. Multiple culture war battles over the past few decades, especially in the 1990s and even more acutely in the Trump Era, made a lot of suburbanites realize that the bargain they had taken in order to win elections was not worth it and abandoned the Republican Party over its seemingly radical views on sociocultural issues such as guns, abortion, LGBTQIA+ rights, school lunch programs, Medicare, and much more.
The suburban blueshift began in Boston because the highly educated Greater Boston economy had an intimate, unique relationship with the New Deal that allowed them to shed their anti-tax views early. By the time the 1980s rolls around, suburbs around the country start shifting blue with the rise of Christian conservatives. By the time Bill Clinton is running for president in 1992, the Republican bastion of Vermont flips blue permanently, signifying the strength of his suburban Democratic message. In 1992, Clinton wins a lot of suburbs in the Northeast and Far West, some by pluralities, and further accelerates this suburban realignment towards the blue. By the end of the 1990s, suburbs in the Northeast and Far West are essentially Democratic strongholds. By the mid-2000s, this process hits and accelerates in Northern Virginia and the Southwest, which allow Democrat Barack Obama to win the 2008 presidential election by winning decisive margins in Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada. After Republicans nominate and elect Donald Trump, the nationwide suburban blueshift accelerates even further and delivers the suburbs of Atlanta and Austin to the Democratic candidate Joe Biden in 2020 and almost flipping the suburbs of Charlotte.
Not only that, but the actual composition of the suburbs themselves has changed a lot in the last several decades. The suburbs boomed in the early postwar era due to government subsidies for single family home construction and sales, and this was accelerated by the White Flight phenomena of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s where affluent whites fled the cities for the suburbs in order to escape the rising minority populations in the urban cores. However, in the last few decades, as minorities have gained affluence and education, they have moved into the suburbs themselves and greatly diversified this once extremely white geography. They have also caused the population density of suburbs to become similar to what urban population density in the 1940s and 1950s averaged at. As the suburbs themselves became more “urbanized”, it was an inevitability that they would start voting more like their parent cities. There has long been research showing that population density is a great predictor of cultural liberalism, and as the suburbs themselves have become more urbanized, it is no surprise to see that their voting patterns have sufficiently been modified.
Actually, I actually dislike the term “suburb” entirely because the word’s meaning is anachronistic to the popular imagination. The popular image of the “suburb” is a maze of single-family homes with large lawns among cul-de-sac neighborhoods where cars are needed to travel a mere half mile. However, this popular imagination is really not accurate anymore. These days, “suburbs” can be broken into two: inner ring suburbs (what I call the “true suburbs”) and the outer ring suburbs (“exurbs”). The popular single-family home maze image is actually no longer true in inner ring suburbs; it actually applies to exurbs. These days, suburbs themselves have become business hubs where large, multinational corporations have their regional or even global headquarters (such as Bridgewater, NJ and King of Prussia, PA) and massive high density housing development; in fact, just based on population density, inner ring suburbs, true suburbs, are actually very similar economically and demographically to the urban cores of the 1950s. The population density of modern inner ring suburbs in northern New Jersey or in the Chicago Collar Counties rivals some major cities like Cleveland and Detroit from the postwar era (and even some major cities today like Virginia Beach). The single-family home maze image, the imagined suburb, is, instead, today, the exurb, or outer ring suburb.
These days, you are not going to find mazes of cul-de-sacs in Wauwatosa, WI (suburb of Milwaukee) or Monroeville, PA (suburb of Pittsburgh); rather, the mazes are instead going to be much further out in far flung Waukesha County or Westmoreland County. The exurbs today vote like the inner ring suburbs did back in the 1950s because demographically and in terms of population density, they are very similar. However, the true suburbs, the inner ring suburbs, are now voting like their parent cities did in the 1950s because they have taken on many of the characteristics (i.e., population density, economic vibrancy, cosmopolitanism, etc.) of their parent cities. In other nations, as the inner ring suburbs take on urban characteristics, they are annexed by the parent city (this is how London’s 36 boroughs came under one single government), but that is not the case in the United States; as such, we have this incomplete vocabulary to describe what is and is not a “true suburb” in American English. With it, we have a hard time really understanding the nature of the suburban blueshift because in other countries, by the time suburbs of a major city have begun to act politically similar to the parent city, they would be merged into the parent city while the “new suburbs” would be the exurbs much further out. Because we do not have this dynamic in this nation, we have to further change how we think about suburbs overall and how they vote.
Will the suburban blueshift endure past Trump? Absolutely. Why? Because the suburban blueshift had nothing to do with Trump in the first place and began decades prior to him. The suburbs shifted blue over the last few decades because the Republican alliance between religious paleoconservatives and educated, affluent suburbanites was untenable due to the culture war. The culture war has not abated, nor will it abate for the foreseeable future. As the parties have entirely engaged the new “great debate” on sociocultural issues and moved on from the economic “great debate” over the extent of the New Deal, their ancestral coalitions have completely ripped apart. Neither the New Deal Coalition nor the Three-Legged Stool are an accurate description for the way in which either party wins elections these days. We have entered a new “great debate” centered on cultural fault lines, and until that “great debate” is resolved, we should expect to see the suburban blueshift only continue to accelerate. The day will come when Democrats are winning even Collin, Denton, and Rockwall Counties in the DFW Metroplex – and that day is not as far away as some might think it is.