Sculminating in a hot, windy afternoon during a visit to the fracking fields of western Texas last month, Donald Trump comforted an ominous vision of suburban America under siege: terrorized by rising crime and threatened by the development of low-income housing.
“It has been a hell for suburbs,” Trump declared, announcing his decision to fire an Obama-era government housing to combat racial segregation in the suburbs, as part of his commitment to preserve what he calls “Suburban Lifestyle Dream”. To the audience, he added: “So, enjoy your life, ladies and gentlemen. Enjoy life.”
About 500 miles east, in the extension of metropolitan Houston, Democrat Sri Preston Kulkarni is running to represent a suburban congressional district that is worlds apart. the one that exists in the image of Trump.
The 22nd Congress District of Texas, which is almost as large as the size of Rhode Island and almost as popular, is so diverse that its campaign literature is distributed in 21 languages. Protests against police brutality and racial discrimination spread throughout the region after the death of George Floyd, a black man who died under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis. And Floyd, a Houston resident, was brought to the district.
“This is new Texas,” said Kulkarni, a former diplomat who grew up in Houston. “It’s diverse, it’s uplifting, it’s dynamic.”
And it’s not just Texas. From Atlanta to Phoenix, this pattern is part of a long-term political reorganization of the suburbs that has been dramatically accelerated by Trump’s presidency.
Once a cornerstone of the Republican coalition, these densely populated metropolitan suburbs are turning increasingly democratic. At the same time, the more sparsely populated outlying areas have become even more deeply Republican, and today against the gains of Democrats elsewhere in the suburbs. The battle is then for the voters in the middle, the suburbs submerged between liberal and conservative America.
So far, Trump has appeared uninterested in convincing these swinging voters back, further alienating them with the inflammatory rhetoric and hardline views about race and cultural heritage that have wound up his base.
But their growing backlash after Trump’s deal with the coronavirus pandemic and his attempts to stifle racial control have again implied the president’s presidential prediction and put his party at risk in Congress.
Trump promotes a vision of the suburbs of America that no longer exists
In recent weeks, Trump has tried to appeal, with little subtlety, to supporters. In one tweet, he promise to protect ‘the Suburban Housewives of America’ from the threat posed by its Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden.
In a play on the perceived racist fears of white proponents, he wrote: ‘I am happy to inform all people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be worried or financially injured by having low-income housing income in your neighborhood. ”
Demographers and political strategists say Trump is promoting a vision on the outskirts of America with decorated housewives, love cul-de-sacs and picket fences that no longer exist.
“He’s talking about an America that is at least 40 or 50 years old,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “Today’s suburbs are actually a microcosm of America.”
A decades-long rise in the number of people of color, immigrants, and college graduates, has transformed the sleepy bedroom communities of the past into sprawling amalgams of American diversity. There are also far fewer housewives and the overall rates of violent crime have decreased significantly.
Following the recent uprising, Trump adopted a strategy used by Richard Nixon as a presidential candidate during the 1968 unrest, promising to be a “president of law and order” and to protect suburbs from outside threats .
But suburban voters say they strongly disapprove of his handling of the protests, according to a New York Times / Siena College poll. An even larger share says they have a favorable view of the Black Lives Matter movement, which Trump calls a “symbol of hatred.”
Overall, recent polls show suburban voters supporting Biden by historical margins.
A recent NPR / PBS NewsHour / Marist poll found that just 35% of suburbs would vote for Trump, almost the same percentage – 33% – who said they approved his job as president. That contrasted with 60% of suburban voters saying they would support Biden.
The disaffection is particularly pronounced among suburban women: 66% said they would support Biden, compared to 48% of suburban men.
“The Trump administration has radicalized women and mothers in various ways,” said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, part of Everytown for Gun Safety, which devotes much of its political race to diversifying Sun Belt states.
Watts was a stay-at-home mom of five when she started the group in 2012, after shooting elementary school student Sandy Hook. She then realized that she was ‘living in a bubble’ like a white suburban woman, and was awakened by the trauma of gun violence that disproportionately affects the colors of communities of color every day.
Watts is of the opinion that white suburban women in the country, for whom gun reform is increasingly becoming a voting priority, have a similar realization in response to the Black Lives Matter protests. In November, she hopes to join Black and Spanish women in removing Trump from office.
“Suburban women are diverse and decisive,” she said, “and they will not be fooled by Donald Trump’s outdated idea of what they should care about.”
Suburban women as a force in American politics is not new. In the 1990s, campaigns targeted the ‘football mothers’. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, they became the ‘security mothers’. And in 2008, Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee, rebranded her “hockey mothers.”
In 2018, suburban women – both candidates and voters – helped Democrats regain control of the House by flipping long Republican districts on the outskirts of Atlanta, Dallas and Houston. In one route, Democrats float all seven districts of Orange County, once a stronghold of suburban conservatism known as Reagan State.
Now in 2020 – less than three months before the November election – Democrats are increasingly confident about their strength in the suburbs as the Biden campaign expands its footprint in states such as North Carolina, Arizona and Texas.
Trump won top voters in 2016 by four percentage points, according to dropout polls. Some strategists believe he has the chance to do so again this year, as swinging voters consider Democrats to be moving too far to the left.
“Suburbanites have not wholesale moved to the Democratic Party,” said Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman from Virginia.
The rich suburban district he once represented is now solidly Democratic, part of a political metamorphosis that has only been removed from power by the Republicans who once dominated this southern state.
“Politics is only just beginning to take on new demographic realities”
Although the suburbs have changed, Davis said they remain an aspiring destination for up-and-coming mobile families and young people, a place where residents expect low crime, fewer taxes, better schools and stable property values. As such, he said they have a divergent political identity as homeowners and parents who increasingly agree with the Republican agenda.
“Trump is talking to suburbs who do not want the city to go to where they are,” Davis said. ‘That’s why they live there. It’s a statement. It’s not a race issue – but it’s a statement of values. ”
Republicans thrive in suburban areas around smaller cities surrounding cities such as Indianapolis and Jacksonville, Florida, which tend to be less diverse and conservative.
Voters in these communities overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2016 and delivered decisive margins in states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, where less than 80,000 votes claimed his victory.
Democrats do not have to win these voters, but they can also not pay to ignore them, said Lanae Erickson, the former vice president of center-left Tinnitus Third Way.
In a new analysis of suburban counties in six battle-torn states, exclusively shared with the Guardian, Third Way identified 30 smaller suburban counties where Democrats have a chance to break those Republican fires.
Using voter data, the analysis projects, for example, that in Pennsylvania the Democrats will grow their vote total in the state’s most populous suburban county, Montgomery County, with 28,792 votes. By contrast, Democrats are expected to get a total of 145,511 votes in the state’s nine smaller suburban counties, in part because of an influx of Latinos.
In a razor-thin election like 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost the state by just 44,000 votes, these counties could be decisive.
Suburbanization will continue to align US policy long after 2020.
“Politics is just beginning to take on new demographic realities,” said Stephen Klineberg, a sociology professor at Rice University and author of Prophetic City: Houston on the Cusp of a Changing America. “By 2050, the whole of America will look out of place as Houston looks today.”
In that sense, the open race for Texas’ 22nd congressional district can be seen as in the future, Klineberg said.
There, in the sprawling suburb of Houston, Kulkarni, whose father is from India and whose mother is a descendant of the city’s namesake, Sam Houston, runs against Troy Nehls, the Republican sheriff of Fort Province. Bend, which occupies much of the district and is almost equally divided between Asian American, African-American, Hispanic and white voters.
During the Republican primary, which questioned the credibility of Trump’s candidates, Nehls described an early attempt by local officials to wear masks and mimic the president’s rhetoric on the protests. But on social media, he has promised to “build bridges” between the minority communities in his district and enforce law.
As Houston grapples with the devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis, as well as the aftermath of protests of racial justice, Kulkarni says voters of all political persuasions are ready to rise above a ‘politics of division’ to go.
“They are tired of the attacks on science and health care,” Kulkarni said. ‘They love the fact that we live in a different area. And I think there is actually more consensus now than I have ever seen before that diversity is our strength, not our weakness. “
