President Trump’s latest campaign announcements warn of left-wing mobs destroying American cities. His recent White House comments have represented an uproar of violence and a “radical movement” to dissolve the police. His Twitter feed has raised the alarm about an Obama-era fair housing rule that he has framed as a threat to “America’s Suburban Housewives” and the “Dream of Suburban Lifestyle.”
It all amounts, with little subtlety, to playing with the perceived fears of suburban voters. But there are several reasons to believe that a strategy that worked for Richard Nixon after the urban riots in 1968 is less likely to be effective for Donald Trump in 2020.
For one thing, these are not the American suburbs of the 1960s (and they have far fewer housewives). The magnitude of urban violence and the threats to this suburban lifestyle are a slight echo of that time. And while polls show that suburban voters disapprove of the president’s work generally, they further disapprove of his handling of the very problems he is trying to raise.
Overall, only 38 percent of voters in the suburbs approve of Trump’s job performance compared to 59 percent who disapprove of it, according to a New York Times / Siena College poll in June. Suburban voters disapproved of Trump’s handling of recent protests and race relations by an even wider margin, and 65 percent had a favorable opinion of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The president’s attention to suburban areas is understandable. Almost half of voters live in a suburb, defined here as the parts of metropolitan areas outside of central cities, such as Philadelphia or Baltimore, that the Census Bureau does not consider rural. In the Times / Siena poll, Trump outpointed Joe Biden by 16 points, 51 percent to 35 percent, in suburban areas, notably worse than his eight-point deficit in similar areas against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The downside of the president in the suburbs is supported by his long-standing weakness among white voters with a four-year college degree, who endorse Mr. Biden, 57 to 31, in the suburbs.
Fifty years ago, white voters with a college degree were a relative rarity, even in the suburbs. White voters who fled the cities often had blue-collar industrial jobs, and many embraced Republican messages on crime and race. To some extent, they still do: Untitled white voters in the suburbs endorse Mr. Trump in the Times / Siena poll, 52 percent to 35 percent, but represent only 37 percent of registered voters surveyed in the suburbs.
If white suburban voters in general are President Trump’s audience for his recent public policy messages, the scenes in Portland, Oregon, have only complicated his speech. The white mothers of the suburbs they observe across the country have seen no marauding criminals, but women who look very much like them.
“The images that are emerging as the most indelible in the public mind are a line of mothers taking tear gas,” said Rick Perlstein, a historian who has written extensively about the Nixon era. “Or a 53-year-old Navy veterinarian who asks people to keep their oath to the United States Constitution.”
There have also been dads with leaf blowers. And peaceful protesters who were violently removed from Lafayette Square outside the White House in June for a presidential photo shoot may represent one of the enduring scenes of the Trump presidency.
At this time, President Trump also differs from Nixon in 1968 in a crucial way. Nixon was not yet president; I was not in charge. It’s much harder to run against clutter when it happens on your watch, Perlstein said. And stoking fears of crime and violence was less effective for President Nixon later in his presidency for the same reason.
In recent decades, cities have become safer and suburbs have become much more racially and economically diverse. They have also been Black Lives Matter protest sites. About one in 10 suburban voters in the Times / Siena poll said they had participated in such a rally. A clear majority of suburban voters also said they believed there were broader patterns in the United States of excessive police violence against African Americans and prejudice against them in the criminal justice system.
For white suburban voters who still live in segregated communities, historian Matthew Lassiter said that the threats to suburban foreclosure today are much weaker than when President Nixon was elected. At that time, the bus was still on the table. There was also a possibility that desegregation plans could send students across city lines to neighboring school districts. Courts were still considering whether it was constitutional for wealthy districts to spend much more on education than poorer ones, or for suburban municipalities to keep low-income housing away.
“The threat of a comprehensive restructuring of suburban privileges was real in the late 1960s and early 1970s because it came from the courts, and it came from civil rights litigants who had a federal judiciary that would go all the way . them, “said Mr. Lassiter, a professor at the University of Michigan.
That was true until President Nixon put four justices on the Supreme Court, who together killed many of those remedies for racial and economic segregation. Today, it is simply less effective to warn that someone will come to destroy the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” of advantageous schools and single-family neighborhoods because a previous generation of white politicians and voters were very successful in protecting it.
President Trump’s warnings today that Biden will remove the police and take federal control of local zoning laws carry significantly less weight. Biden has said he does not support the police outlay. And the Obama-era fair housing rule, which the Trump administration announced it would end last week, is too bureaucratic and incremental to be easily handled like a sack man. Its central objective was to make local governments consider the patterns of segregation in their planning.
Sometimes President Trump himself seems unsure how to describe what is so scary about it, leaving those arguments to the opinions of others. If anything, their foray into the issue may teach some moderate and liberal voters that their yard signs opposing affordable housing and denser zoning put them in an awkward lineup with President Trump.
Backward-looking historians in the Nixon era add that this president is unlikely to succeed with white suburban voters for one more reason: he is not as subtle about it as President Nixon, or Vice President Spiro Agnew, or Ronald Reagan after them.
“They understood something about race that Trump doesn’t understand,” Lassiter said. “Voters don’t want racial privilege to be questioned, but they don’t want to be explicitly reminded that racism is below their position.”
Because that tension persists, historian Lily Geismer is skeptical that white suburban voters who support the Black Lives Matter protests now, and who may be Biden voters in the fall, also support affordable housing that diversifies their neighborhoods or supports city budgets that would cut police funds. In the Times / Siena poll, 49 percent of suburban voters said they strongly opposed reducing funding for police departments.
Professor Geismer, who teaches at Claremont McKenna College, noted that some of these same voters who today speak out for racial justice are also talking about taking their children out of public schools during the coronavirus crisis and hiring private tutors.
“The idea that we support Black Lives Matter, but we are trying to do everything possible to protect the educational well-being of our own children, that is the disconnect that I see,” he said.
Ultimately, these are two separate questions: How will suburban voters respond to President Trump in the fall, and what will they endorse after the election, regardless of its outcome.
