Perhaps the only way to turn scholarly attention to the suburbs is to focus on their politics

A long piece comparing the disparate fates of Parma and Shaker Heights outside of Cleveland, Ohio suggests it is politics that makes it worth examining suburbs:

We don’t spend much time thinking about the suburbs. That’s sort of the point — they’re purposely and pleasantly boring, a cul-de-sac monolith of culture. But the suburbs also form the worldviews of 175 million Americans. Whom you live next to, where your parents went to school, what store opens down the street — all these small things shape the politics of Americans before they even know what politics are.

In the past few years, the suburbs have also shown themselves to be the heart of the shifting politics of the nation. According to exit polls, Hillary Clinton lost the suburbs to Donald Trump in 2016, continuing a slump for Democrats — Obama lost the suburban vote in 2012 after nabbing it in 2008. But in the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats took back the House on the strength of their showing in suburban districts.

Lots of theories for the changing political proclivities of suburban Americans have been floated, and white Americans are front and center. (White people are the majority in 90 percent of America’s suburban counties.) Class has something to do with it. Over the past few years, college-educated white people have been increasingly more apt to vote for Democrats, while those without a college education skew Republican.

But what do we mean when we talk about “class” and politics?

Indeed, there is a growing body of research from political scientists and others as well as plenty of media interest (example I am quoted in here) on political changes in suburbia. The general pattern is this: Democrats tend to win in communities closer to the city, Republicans tend to win in the exurbs, and the two parties are now dueling over middle suburbs. While these are broad patterns, there can be communities within metropolitan areas that do not exactly fit the mold (as this article notes).

At the same time, I find it odd that this may be the only reason scholars and commentators may pay attention to the suburbs. If the majority of Americans live there (175 million residents, according to the number above), isn’t this enough reason to focus on them? Or, is everything today about counting votes and political races, to the exclusion of the other important factors in suburban life?

This analysis of two Cleveland suburbs also has the pieces for a more accurate and ultimately interesting look at these two communities. In discussions of social class along with race and community history, the article hints at how two suburbs can come to such unique outcomes in a particular election cycle. Think inertia plus community decisions and outside pressure. But, since the goal is to illustrate the issues Democrats face in the suburbs, we are not allowed to consider these suburbs in their own right. Instead, they serve as fleeting communities that are not worth considering more deeply except for their votes.

Suburban residential segregation and ongoing effects on voting and prejudice

A long New York TImes op-ed summarizes the findings of the 2017 book The Space Between Us by political scientist Ryan Enos:

Enos then looked at results from 124,034 precincts, almost every precinct in the United States. Again:

“A white voter in the least-segregated metropolitan area was 10 percentage points more likely to vote for Obama than a white voter in the most-segregated area.”…

These voting patterns, according to Enos, reflect what might be called a self-reinforcing cycle of prejudice.

“Prejudice may have helped cause segregation, but then the segregation helped cause even more prejudice.”

In other words, it is not just problematic that people of different racial/ethnic groups and social classes choose to (possible more often for whites and those with more financial resources) or are pushed to live in different places from each other. The residential segregation then has a feedback loop where those differences reinforced by spatial arrangements are perpetuated and perhaps even amplified.

As more of the op-ed explains, simply putting people together (such as suggested by Allport’s contact hypothesis or in the train experiment described in the essay) is not a silver bullet for forging relationships, networks, and reduced prejudices. Even as attitudes toward other groups have improved over time, what would push wealthier whites to sacrifice or put themselves into uncomfortable positions when they do not have to?

Coastal elites among middle America = “Margaret Mead among Samoans”








Fighting over suburban voters and Trump lost ground

Democrats and Republicans both need suburban voters and analysis of the 2016 presidential results suggests Donald Trump lost ground in some suburban areas:

Trump’s general election struggles in suburbia were anticipated. With few exceptions he struggled in those same localities in the primary season, routinely losing suburbs to Sens. Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. Trump’s ability to press an agenda that wins those suburban voters back—or Democrats’ ability to seize on this schism—may largely define the success of both parties in the next era of American politics.

A national analysis of 20 high-growth suburban Republican counties surrounding the metropolitan areas of Chicago, Columbus, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Kansas City, St. Louis, Nashville, Atlanta, Charlotte, Jacksonville, Richmond, Washington, Denver, New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, Austin, and Fort Worth show the same softness in Trump support across disparate regions of the country. Of those 20 counties studied, only St. Charles, Missouri, delivered a Trump a larger margin than it had given Romney. The 20 suburban growth counties studied collectively gave Romney a 753,442-vote advantage over Obama but yielded Trump a smaller 467,120-vote advantage over Clinton…

Democratic strategists are hawking the narrative that Trump’s metropolitan problem was due primarily to minority voters, and some of that is true. In Gwinnett and Cobb Counties outside Atlanta, white voters now make up less than two-thirds of the population and Trump was nine percentage points weaker than Romney had been. But Trump’s softness in even heavily white suburbs indicates a broader warning sign for Republicans….

Suburbanites Like Republicans But Not Trump

Who will put together the best campaign to reach these suburban voters in 2020? Perhaps we need to update the phrase from the Nixon campaign of “Will it play in Peoria?” (though the original phrase came from vaudeville, not politics) to something more like will it play in Cobb County or Loundon County or Kendall County.

The ever-active big city as antidote to Donald Trump





When the candidate with the big data advantage didn’t win the presidency








Connecting sundown towns and votes for Trump in Wisconsin













Chicago suburbs largely go for Clinton

Bucking historical trends, all but McHenry County in the Chicago suburbs went for Hillary Clinton.

The Democratic Party of DuPage got a sudden influx of young foot soldiers, like organizer Alex Franklin, who campaigned for charismatic Democrat Bernie Sanders until the Vermont senator conceded to Clinton in July, then went to work for Clinton. Clinton won DuPage County by 14 percentage points on Tuesday.

“If you look at the holes right now, even where Democrats lost in DuPage there were absurdly high numbers, which are a direct result of the Sanders people and what we were doing out here,” said Franklin, of Glen Ellyn. He sees the merger of Clinton and Sanders supporters as the beginning of a beautiful friendship that will spill over into spring municipal elections…

This year, support for local candidates by minorities down ballot helped Clinton at the top of the ticket, experts said…

Shunning the New York billionaire might have cost Illinois Republicans down ballot, said Mark Fratella, a Trump delegate and Addison Township GOP organizer.

A variety of explanations. Yet, one is ignored here: the Chicago suburbs have experienced a lot of demographic change in recent decades: more non-white residents, more immigrants moving directly to the suburbs (rather than to neighborhoods of Chicago first), more lower and working-class residents. In other words, the images of Lake County and the North Shore or DuPage County as looking like Lake Forest, Highland Park, Hinsdale, Elmhurst, and Wheaton (all white and wealthy) simply do not hold.

A great graphic shows the change over time in recent elections:

Elections since 1960

The trends are clearly away from Republicans in the collar counties.

See earlier posts about presidential candidates fighting over the suburban vote here and here.

Explaining white evangelicals: American Evangelicalism, Embattled and Thriving

With all the talk of white evangelicals in the postmortem of the 2016 election, it is useful to return to a 1998 sociological book about this group: Christian Smith’s American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. Here is one way we can understand white evangelicals from a sociological perspective:

1. Smith adopts the subcultural theory to explain the group’s success and current standing. This has two dimensions:

“The subcultural identity theory of religious persistence is this: Religion survives and can thrive in pluralistic, modern society by embedding itself in subcultures that offer satisfying morally orienting collective identities which provide adherents meaning and belonging.” (118)

“And the subcultural identity theory of religious strength is this: In a pluralistic society, those religious groups will be relatively stronger which better possess and employ the cultural tools needed to create both clear distinction from and significant engagement and tension with other relevant outgroups, short of becoming genuinely countercultural.” (118-119)

In this perspective, pluralism can actually help religious groups by fostering a sense of shared identity compared to the broader society and also providing opportunities for engagement with others.

2. The vitality of the group often depends on drawing strong distinctions between the group and the outside world.

“The evangelical tradition’s entire history, theology, and self-identity presupposes and reflects strong cultural boundaries with nonevangelicals; a zealous burden to convert and transform the world outside of itself; and a keen perception of external threats and crises seen as menacing what it views to be true, good, and valuable.” (121)

3. Evangelicals want to engage social issues but are ultimately limited in what they can accomplish because of their approach.

“the only truly effective way to change the world is one-individual-at-a-time through the influence of interpersonal relationships.”(187)

“they routinely offer one-dimensional analyses and solutions for multidimensional social issues and problems.” (189)

4. When it comes to political action, evangelicals support government intervention in some areas (like abortion, gay rights, and prayer in schools) but not in other areas. This leads to an unresolvable tension.

“By this we mean, in short, that many evangelicals think that Christian morality should be the primary authority for American culture and society and simultaneously think that everyone should be free to live as they see fit, even if that means rejecting Christianity.” (210)

5. Thus, the problems with evangelicalism come from within.

“Evangelicalism’s problems, in other words, are largely subculturally indigenous, difficulties of their own tradition’s making.”(217)

While the data for this book came from the culture wars era (comprehensive surveys and interviews conducted in the mid 1990s with ordinary evangelicals), a lot of this still rings true today.

A follow-up post tomorrow will contrast Smith’s understanding (as well as other sociological emphases) compared to how white evangelicals understand themselves.