By Luke Thompson
Thursday, November 12, 2020
The election returned a mixed result. The American people elected Joe Biden president by far narrower margins than expected. Republicans will probably retain control of the Senate, despite having been vastly outspent. Most surprising, Democrats lost House seats in a year when they confidently predicted gains, leaving Nancy Pelosi’s majority attenuated and her leadership of the lower chamber in doubt.
For much of this electoral ambivalence, thank America’s suburbs.
Republicans have long drawn support from the leafy neighborhoods that ring our cities, yet that support has slowly dwindled this century. As a result, Democrats now compete for and win suburban congressional seats once thought safe for Republicans. This year, Joe Biden did better with suburban voters than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, building on her leads in some large suburban counties, flipping others, and eating into Republican margins in red counties. As a result, once-safe red states are now up for grabs.
Comparing this presidential election with the last one, we find that Biden improved most in suburbs south of the Mason-Dixon line. In metro Atlanta, Gwinett County voted eight points more Democratic. On the other side of the city, Fayette County stayed red, but Trump’s vote share was reduced by five points. In Texas, Collin County, home to Plano, and Hays County, between Austin and San Antonio, both moved toward Biden by more than six points.
In Arizona, Maricopa and Pima Counties, which together are home to three-fourths of the state’s population, moved toward the Democrats by six and eight points, respectively. And in North Carolina, Trump carried the Republican stronghold of Union County, southeast of Charlotte, by 24 points — six points less than in 2016.
Despite these shifts, down-ballot Republicans generally survived. Senator Thom Tillis did marginally better than Trump in the Charlotte suburbs, and the GOP kept hold of the North Carolina legislature. Senator Susan Collins outpaced the president by large margins in Maine’s tony coastal towns. Congressman Roger Marshall, running for Kansas’s open Senate seat, trailed the president’s county-level vote share everywhere except in Democratic heartlands, including the college towns of Lawrence and Manhattan, and the upscale Kansas City suburbs in Johnson County. The state legislature’s Republican supermajorities, in doubt before Election Day, survived.
In short, America’s suburbs are moving blue generally but not uniformly. The Republican Party was losing ground in the suburbs before Trump, and while he may have accelerated that process, GOP setbacks cannot be laid solely at his feet. Republicans are far from being wiped out, with numerous House and Senate candidates having won even as Trump lagged. Before Republicans cede the suburbs, or launch a crusade to reclaim them, they need to understand the roots of this electoral shift.
Americans enjoy a good story about politics, and there may be no more persistent political story than the myth of realignment and the “critical elections” that drive it. In the conventional telling, critical elections shake up the party coalitions and reorder the governing landscape for decades to come: They reset the parameters of electoral politics, forging a durable majority coalition empowered to implement its policies and relegating a vanquished minority to the noisy political periphery.
Doubtless, any number of pundits will declare the suburban swing a realignment of the parties caused by Trump’s distinct style and personality. Yet dig into the data, and the picture gets cloudy. As the political scientist David Mayhew has ably shown, under closer scrutiny, it becomes impossible to establish a consistent standard for defining a “critical election” that causes a realignment of the parties.
Behind the political divinations of cable-news haruspices, demography and political economy move like electoral tectonic plates. These shifts matter far more than any single election — they are easily as much cause as consequence. Two things have driven the suburban swing: The suburbs are changing, both economically and demographically, and a cohort of “heritage Republicans” who’ve been turned off by the GOP is emerging among suburbanites of long tenure.
As the urbanist Richard Florida has pointed out, American suburbs, like the cities they surround, are becoming less interchangeable, more winner-take-all. The wealthiest suburbs continue to boom, but their second- and third-tier counterparts struggle. As a result, poverty in many suburbs has grown, both overall and proportionally. Young people, especially high earners, have clustered increasingly in cities. Deindustrialization has sapped suburban manufacturing. The opioid epidemic has hit the burbs hard. Violent crime has risen. Growth, long the engine of suburban economic success, has moved farther and farther out to the exurban edge of metropolitan areas. Walkable, inner-ring suburbs have thrived, but not so their middle- and outer-ring cousins.
These factors might have made down-market suburbs, like deindustrialized towns, prime pickup opportunities for Trump and the GOP more broadly. When the final precinct-level data on this election come in, that may indeed prove to have been the case. But additional considerations should give us pause.
The landscape of suburban employment has changed. The suburbs were built to house downtown commuters, and still do. Many large companies, however, especially in the so-called knowledge economy, have themselves moved to the burbs. In the middle of the last century, it was notable when financial firms decided to set up shop in Fairfield County, Conn., rather than maintain Manhattan offices. It is now the norm. And while upscale Greenwich and its surrounds were long a GOP stronghold, Fairfield County has been reliably Democratic for years.
Two industries could be especially important to the changing political complexion of America’s suburbs: health care and education. Disproportionately clustered in suburbs, both sectors are growing as proportions of the economy. According to a Hamilton Project report, the last half century has seen health care grow from roughly 6 percent of GDP to nearly 20. Likewise, market-research firms consistently find education outpacing most other economic sectors.
Health care and education are also structurally more amenable to major government intervention and comparatively insulated against shifts in the business cycle. The professional-class employees who fill these firms and institutions are thus less likely to feel the negative macroeconomic effects of a Democratic regulatory regime than their counterparts in other fields. GOP tax-cut promises no doubt appeal, but so do Democratic pledges to sustain and expand blanket federal subsidies for major actors in each sector.
This economic diversity is mirrored by growing ethnic and racial diversity. According to a 2014 report from the Brookings Institution, while immigrants remain underrepresented in the suburbs as a percentage of the overall population, foreign-born residents are moving to the suburbs at disproportionate rates. Many of these are high-skilled immigrants who work in the education and health-care sectors.
Additionally, fully three-quarters of black Americans live in suburbs today. As the black middle class has recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, black professionals have moved in increasing numbers into upscale suburbs. At the same time, as cities have gentrified rapidly, black and immigrant workers at the lower end of the economic ladder have been pushed out to the periphery. The tendency of Democrats to do better with blacks and many new-immigrant groups has made the suburbs bluer — for now.
Finally, while the suburbs still have higher marriage rates than the rest of America, the gap is shrinking. Unmarried women vote more reliably with Democrats than do their married counterparts. In 2012, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney among unmarried white women by more than ten points. This election, that number was doubtlessly higher. Small wonder, then, that Democrats do well as more unmarried women live in the suburbs.
Cultural politics also matters in explaining the suburban drift. Among the suburban middle class, a narrow cohort of former Republican voters has turned away from the party. Although some of these Republicans would self-identify as Never Trump, they started voting for Democrats before Trump was on the stage. Indeed, they account for the beginning of the suburban drift during George W. Bush’s presidency.
Narrow cohorts matter immensely in tightly contested elections. The Trump presidency has brought new groups of Americans into the Republican fold, but it has also hastened the slipping away of these heritage Republicans.
Blue-collar whites continued to support the party of Jackson at the state level while fleeing the party of Obama at the federal level. Something similar may be happening in reverse among the country-club set. Or perhaps a Biden presidency will drive them back into the Republican fold. Regardless, they will be key to deciding the future of suburban politics — and perhaps of the country.
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