Hey so, what are the suburbs? I thought I knew but then there’s a bunch of stuff that I see called suburbs and I guess technically apply but they’re very different from each other.
I know this ^^^ is the suburbs. Green lawns, very uniform houses, no diversity of lot types. When I hear people talk about “suburbs,” I often hear them talking about this. But sometimes when people talk about “the suburbs,” they mean this:
More trees, and the layout is a big less regular. Still green lawns, for the most part, and houses on the nicer side. But suburbs are also apparently this:
Back to the dense layout, but there’s a grid-like shape thats closer to the urban areas it surrounds, and often the houses are alongside a road that runs right up through that urban area; there’s less of a border. Oh and sometimes the suburbs are this, or this, or this, or this:
Sometimes the sidewalks are directly off the road. Sometimes there’s a grass border. Sometimes there’s no sidewalks at all. Sometimes the roads are marked. Sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes neighborhoods are on through roads, sometimes they’re dead ends, or cul-de-sacs.
I think these differences between places all considered “suburbs” is important, as well as maybe differentiating the ones that are actually “exurbs,” because they affect what we mean when we talk about car dependency, loss of biodiversity, and class differences. A suburban area with sidewalks may still be extremely car dependent, but is different than one without sidewalks. A suburban area with trees and natural plants has a different biodiversity level than ones with just grass lawns. A suburban area can encompass a range of wealth and class brackets, depending on its features.
Republicans don’t seem to know how to stop bleeding support from the suburbs.
The road to political power runs through the suburbs and exurbs. Not a HUGE surprise, but we were again reminded of this in the November elections.
Republicans insist on alienating people there with their hardline MAGA ideology and authoritarianism. Democrats have benefited by default, but to ensure victory in the burbs we need to be more proactive and do more grassroots organizing there.
The victories Democrats racked up on Tuesday night spanned safe blue states, Trump country, and one-time battlegrounds: A popular governor was re-elected in Kentucky; Virginia Democrats flipped control of the state house and kept their majority in the state senate; Democrats reversed GOP gains in New Jersey’s legislature; Pennsylvania voters delivered a Democratic romp in statewide contests; and the liberal positions won big in Ohio’s two ballot measures to enshrine the right to an abortion and to legalize marijuana.
Post-election vote totals show that much of that success was due to a very specific kind of American: affluent, college-educated voters who are likely to live in the suburbs of metropolitan areas. In Kentucky, that means the areas in and around Louisville, where vote totals from the secretary of state’s office show that Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear improved his 2019 margins by nearly 10 percentage points; the counties in and around Lexington, where he improved by an average of 9 points; and in the three northern counties that sit across the state line from Cincinnati, Ohio, where vote totals show he improved by an average of 3 points.
Ohio was a similar story: The “Yes” vote on Issue 1, which protects reproductive rights, saw its biggest support come from major urban centers and their suburbs, where it performed better than the Democratic Senate nominee in last year’s elections. Vote totals tallied by the New York Times show the “Yes” vote performing 6 points better in and around Cleveland, 11 points better in neighboring Lorain County, and 8 points better in nearby Summit County. It also won the vote outright in five other neighboring counties that Democrats lost last year.
This picture also appeared in the suburbs of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, where vote totals reported by these states show a common theme: Suburbs, and places with higher concentrations of wealthier and better-educated voters, swung to the left. It’s a trend that’s been largely true since the dawn of the Trump era: Republicans have been consistently struggling to perform as well as they once did in the suburbs, giving Democrats an opening to persuade and turn out voters that are crucial to winning statewide races in battleground states.
Extremism and instability have increasingly become identified with Republicans. It's not just Trump's unhinged rantings but also the constant threats by the GOP to shut down government, politicize law enforcement, weaken national security, and cut programs that help the middle class in order to provide more tax breaks for the filthy rich.
This trend has held strong since 2016, when suburban and college-educated voters lurched away from Donald Trump for Hillary Clinton. They had been much more likely to side with Republicans as recently as 2014: In Northern Virginia, Virginia Beach, and the Richmond suburbs, Republicans had won or run nearly even with Democrats in the suburbs; the same was true in places like suburban Colorado, Georgia, and Wisconsin in 2012 and 2014.
In the “blue wave” of the 2018 midterms, these more diverse and highly educated regions voted out Republican members of Congress. And the suburban shift contributed much of the margin of support that buoyed Joe Biden to victory in battleground states in 2020 and helped Democratic candidates win in close midterm elections last year.
The common line? Ideological polarization around social issues and Trump’s brand of politics.
Progressive stability and rights is a message that works.
Some people on the fringe left might not appreciate such a strategy, but if you really want power in a democratic system the goal is to attract a broad majority – not to placate a rigidly ideological minority. And that's exactly what the GOP has become – a gradually shrinking elitist cult centered on MAGA ideology.
John Hood recently wrote a curious column about the rise of the Republican Party in North Carolina. Much of it is right. The number of registered Democrats has been shrinking continuously for decades. The number of registered Republicans has been growing. However, the shift to unaffiliated is the really story. The GOP controls two-thirds of the state’s county boards of commission and more local…
