"Cliche campaign ads might show acres of wheat and bustling cities, but the United States is a suburban nation,” says an Associated Press analysis.
Fifty-two percent of voters in 2018 said they live in suburbia, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of the electorate.
Once firmly in Republican control, suburbs increasingly are politically divided — a rare common ground shared by Republicans and Democrats, says AP.
And they're poised to decide not just who wins the White House this year but also who controls the Senate and the contours of the debate over guns, immigration, work, schools, housing and healthcare for years to come, says AP.
Suburbs have become more racially diverse, more educated, more economically prosperous and more liberal — all factors making them more likely to vote Democratic.
And demographers and political scientists point to another trend: density. Suburbs have become more crowded, looking more and more like cities and voting like them, too.
For decades, an area’s population per square mile has been a reliable indicator of its political tilt, with denser areas voting Democratic and less dense areas voting Republican, says AP. The correlation between density and voting has been getting stronger, as people started to sort themselves by ethnicity, education, personality, income and lifestyle.
In the midterm elections of 2018, Democrats found voters farther from the city and flipped a net 39 House districts and won a majority of the chamber.
Polling shows President Trump trailing Joe Biden badly in many key suburbs in battleground states, says AP. To hold the White House and control of the Senate, Trump and his party must stop what AP calls the "flip zone" from moving farther out again.
Comments