Tag Archives: Democrats

“Gloom” and suburban women ahead of 2022 elections

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Focus groups convened by a set of Democratic groups suggests suburban women are not feeling good about what is happening in Washington, D.C.:

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Earlier this week, 10 women from across the country met on Zoom and talked for two hours as part of a focus group on politics. All of the women were white, lived in the suburbs and had been identified as swing voters. One was a mother from Iowa who owns a small business. Another teaches special education in Florida. And there was a school bus driver from Pennsylvania….

Democrats need support from suburban women if they want to keep their House and Senate majorities in November. The women in the focus group didn’t necessarily dislike Biden. They supported the infrastructure law and opposed measures that restrict voting access. They applauded Biden for his hot-mic moment — the one when he muttered a disparaging remark about a Fox News reporter. They disliked Trump, and they were disgusted with those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Despite all of that, they weren’t eager to vote for Democrats in the midterm elections in November…

“It’s absolutely essential that by Election Day, these suburban women are looking at Washington and seeing it as a place that can get things done,” said Meredith Kelly, a Democratic strategist.

There is a lot of time until November elections but the pattern is clear for the national political parties: appeal to suburban voters, particularly those who have voted for Republicans and Democrats in their past and need some motivation to go one way or another.

My sense is that historically Joe Biden has been a politician who has successfully made this appeal. Throughout his career, Biden has talked about the middle-class and providing opportunities for people to provide for themselves and their families.

But, Biden is now operating in a particular context. Suburban politics have some new wrinkles – school board elections, mask mandates – and some long-standing concerns: protect property values and a way of life, ensure success for children, enable local government to serve and adjust to local conditions.

Perhaps neither party has to have a wave of suburban voters in their favor but rather (1) get the right suburban voters in the closest races that matter the most for the Senate and House and/or (2) drive up voter turnout for their side. As I live in a district that is somewhat mixed politically, I will be watching how appeals are made and how they work.

Changing political party control at the county level: DuPage County in 2020, the 1930s, and 1856

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Voters in DuPage County appear to have supported Democrats more than Republicans at every level in the 2020 election:

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DuPage County, once known as one of the most solidly Republican areas in the country, appears to have given Democrats control of the County Board for the first time since the 1930s. Two more Democrats are leading their races for countywide office, and could be joined by another when the final votes are tallied.

DuPage voters also backed Democrats in every federal race from president to U.S. representative, as well as every state senator and nine of 13 state representatives.

It’s a stunning turn of fortune two decades in the making, observers say, the result of shifting demographics, shrewd campaigning and the divisive reign of President Donald Trump.

The article above tells of recent changes in DuPage County with new residents and a desire for a new party in charge.

But, as the article also notes, this is not the first time such a shift has happened in DuPage County. I do not know much about what happened in the 1930s – I assume the Great Depression and the New Deal were involved – but I have read more about what happened in the 1850s.

In the early decades of DuPage County, which was officially founded in 1839, local political leaders were Democrats. For example, Joseph Naper, founder of Naperville, served in several political positions as a Democrat. Local historian Leone Schmidt details this state of affairs in her 1989 book When the Democrats Ruled DuPage.

This Democrat hold on DuPage politics lasted about two decades. Schmidt concludes her book with the changes that came with the first Republican party candidates in the 1856 elections.

Historian Stephen J. Buck further describes the shift in a 2019 article in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society:

In “Free Soil, Free Labor, and Free Men: The Origins of the Republican Party in DuPage County, Illinois,” Stephen Buck synthesizes many of the widely accepted explanations for the Republican Party’s emergence in the 1850s, including the powerful ideal of free-soil in the trans-Mississippi West; opposition to the political clout of the “Slave Power” nationally; and genuine moral commitments to the abolition of Slavery. DuPage County, in Buck’s retelling, serves as a sort of case study in the steady growth of free-soil principles in northern Illinois beginning in the 1840s. Buck finds that by the time of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, the sectional crisis was so encompassing that it deeply inscribed party identification, even in elections to town and county offices.

This work builds on Buck’s 1992 dissertation where he goes into detail regarding the changes. The issue of slavery and free soil was important in DuPage County and when the Republican Party started in 1854, it quickly attracted support in northern Illinois. In the 1856 elections, Republicans convincingly beat Democrats in local races. And this trend continued in subsequent elections.

Comparing the current shift toward the Democrat party in DuPage County to past shifts, this one seems to be longer in the making. It takes time for suburban populations to change dramatically as different communities attract different residents and national and state politics and forces interact with local conditions. Yet, DuPage residents of the future may well look to the elections of 2016 and 2020 where DuPage turned to the hands of Democrats.

Questions arising from “Hidden networks of [Democratic] suburban women”

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Continuing the attention paid to suburban voters in the upcoming 2020 election, one article examines groups of suburban women with political goals:

Ohio, a former swing state, has moved swiftly to the right since President Donald Trump won by 8 percentage points in 2016; Republicans have dominated, save for Democrat Sherrod Brown’s 300,000-vote Senate win in 2018. Yet, brewing in these red counties, from Geauga in the north to Warren in the south, is a contrasting rally cry: Ohio is a swing state, and suburban women who were often previously politically inert will be the ones to make it such in 2020. This is not the same crowd as the women’s marches or Indivisible groups that sprouted in 2017, and their rhetoric doesn’t have the sharp edge of Trump’s fiercest critics. Many have kept their nascent activities hidden on private Facebook groups and invite-only events, only to emerge for 2020 as a new network — unconnected to any campaign or party, but designed to boost Ohio Democrats’ flagging fortunes here.

These groups range from the Organized Progressives Standing United (OPSU) and the Bay Village Nasty Women to the Progressive Women in Westerville and Positively Blue in Dublin. The OPSU had 20 members when Julie Womack, 51, of Mason, Ohio, joined it in November 2018. Now, it has 500. In September 2019, a few months after leaving a left-leaning media job in Washington, D.C., Paris launched Red, Wine & Blue, a statewide network of blue-leaning women (and some men) pushing for higher political involvement in 12 suburban Ohio counties. A dozen groups have since joined her network…

The women often worry about drawing too much heat in communities where they have felt politically isolated. “Democrat is a dirty word down here,” says Womack, whose group was “secret” when she joined it but is now public. She sees OPSU’s rapid growth as a mirror of her own need for political outspokenness — especially in Warren County, which went for Republican Gov. Mike DeWine by 36 percentage points in 2018. “I’m at the point in my life now that I just don’t care. To label yourself a Democrat or a progressive [here], you’re going to feel ganged-up upon. You’ll stand out.”…

It might not be enough, suggests Richard Perloff, a professor of political media and communication at Cleveland State University who believes that the narrative of suburban women turning Ohio blue in 2020 may be “overly optimistic.”

Three quick thoughts:

1. By virtue of being hidden, private, or less public with their activities, it is hard to know how many such groups exist. And how many groups are on the opposite side of the political aisle?

2. Another angle to this could be a need more Americans feel to keep their personal politics quieter or at a simmering level until an opportunity (like an election or a threat of war) comes. This approach could be more popular for a number of reasons: more divisive public rhetoric, animosity toward outspoken political comments, limited support for political minorities, a decrease in confidence in and participation in traditional voluntary associations. This could help contribute to increased difficulty in using public opinion polls to predict elections. (A possible flip side to this: each private group can operate more independently without being beholden to a larger organization. And suburbanites may care about national politics but they like local control.)

3. Where are there public spaces in Ohio and other states where people can gather to talk about politics and other matters relating to community life? The missing third places or public spaces featuring regular mixing of people mean more activity and conversation takes place in private spaces or by invitation and planning rather than through spontaneity or a regular presence in a particular location.

Kotkin argues both political parties want to destroy single-family home suburbia

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The single-family home may be the bedrock of the American suburbs and Joel Kotkin suggests both political parties ignore this at their own peril:

However much they might detest Trump , suburbanites are not likely to rally long-term to a party that seeks to wipe out their way of life. The assault on suburbia, both from the ultra-capitalist right and socialist-minded left, neglects the very reasons—space and privacy—people of all ethnicities move to suburbia. Just as Republicans can ignore the unintended consequences of ultra-free market policies, Democrats ignore the aspirations of their own voters.

More important still, the anti-single-family campaign undermines the foundation of our democracy. The essence of American civilization has been the pursuit of a better life for oneself and one’s family. Take away the ability to own one’s home and we are well on our road to a neo-feudal society where the masses will need to rely on the state not only for housing but, without meaningful assets, to finance their retirement.

The clamor to restrict single-family homes and thus push the American dream further out of many Americans’ reach, represents an assault on what both parties once espoused. An America without widespread homeownership is no longer an aspirational country, but a place where people remain imprisoned by their class and unable to pursue what they perceive as a better quality of life.

Kotkin’s argument seems to go like this:

  1. The suburbs are the way they are because the American people wanted to live in suburbia. Both political parties supported this mission for much of the 20th century through monies and programs.
  2. Unless Democrats and Republicans cater to suburban voters, they will have a difficult future as political parties.

But, this seems to assume that this suburban way of life based around a home and emphasis on family will always continue this way. To some degree, Americans did desire land and privacy from the beginning yet the suburban experience was really made available to the masses first around the turn of the twentieth century and then even more so after World War II. Younger or future Americans could decide they would prefer cities and denser areas or even rural areas and the political parties could help lead them in that direction.

All that to say, I think Kotkin is right in that a majority of Americans continue to profess interest in living in suburbia. At the same time, this could change in the future and one or both of the political parties could start leading in that direction. Not all Americans want to be suburbanites so there is political room to suggest alternatives.

Nixon’s liberal economic policies and other reminders that the major political parties can change

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Media discourse about political parties as well as the public pronouncements of politicians tend to reify that certain policy positions are fixed between the two political parties. “Republicans always want to help the wealthy with their tax cuts.” “Democrats always fight for non-white residents.” And so on.

Yet, political parties change positions fairly regularly and often do so for political, rather than ideological, considerations. Here are two examples I found while reading American Sociology: From Pre-Disciplinary to Post-Normal by Stephen Turner.

Nixon proposed such things as minimum income rights and a national health care policy: both were rejected by the Democrats on the grounds that they should be more generous, and in the hope that they would be able to gain power and enact policies more to their liking. In any event, they got neither minimum incomes nor health care guarantees. Ted kennedy, the principal obstacle to the health care compromise offered by Nixon, later regretted his failure to accept it. (p. 55)

And an earlier example:

Race was a problem for reformers: on the one hand they were sympathetic to uplifting the Black masses; on the other they were inclined to regard them as in need of civilizing. The Progressive Party platform makers, including Jane Addams, were persuaded by their presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt to omit any references to improving the conditions of Blacks, on the ground that this would cost the party politically – this was at a time win which the Republican Party, from which Roosevelt was splitting, was the party of Blacks. (p.24)

It might be easy to write this off as being in the past – anything past even just a few years ago is very difficult to discuss in media settings – but these two examples provide a reminder that political parties can indeed change dramatically. What Democrats and Republicans look like today is not the same as they were decades ago nor will they necessarily be the same ten or twenty years from now.

“Blue surge in [suburban] Georgia” quote

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I talked earlier this week with Patrik Jonsson of the Christian Science Monitor about the primary race in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District in the Atlanta suburbs. Here is part of the story published on Wednesday:

In part seen as a referendum on President Trump, Ossoff’s out-of-the-blue campaign also offers a mirror on how changing suburban values are coming to a head in unexpected ways.

In the past decade especially, Atlanta suburbs like Cobb, Dekalb, and Fulton, parts of which make up the Sixth, have become younger, more diverse, more place-focused, and more urbane than their dad’s suburbs. A values shift toward walkability and sustainability is creating opportunities for moderates like Ossoff who respect suburban traditions while also seeking not to exclude people by race or wealth…

The new suburban appeal resonates not just for younger Americans in search of authentic experiences, but older ones as well, ranging from empty nesters who want a more urban lifestyle without having to move to the city to Gen X divorcees who are trying to juggle jobs, social lives, and two households without being stuck in Atlanta traffic all day.

“The suburbs are not just composed of wealthy conservatives, even though such communities do exist,” says Brian Miller, a Wheaton College, Ill., sociologist who studies the suburbs. The difference is that “there are now a variety of populations with a variety of concerns.” That means “local and national elections may [now] depend on reaching voters in middle suburbs who might go either way depending on the candidates, economic conditions [and] quality of life concerns.”

I’ll add a bit more since this touches on one areas of my research: from the outside, suburbs may look all the same. The physical pieces may be similar (different configurations of subdivisions, roads, big box stores and fast food establishments, etc.) and there are presumed to be similar values (middle-class homeowners who fiercely protect local interests such as property values). Yet, if you spend time in suburban areas, you find that communities can differ quite a bit even if they all fit under the umbrella term “suburb.” Depending on the demographics of particular communities (and suburbs are increasingly non-white as well as have more poor residents) as well as unique histories (which are influenced by the date of founding, distance from the big city, and actions of past and current leaders), suburbs can be quite different and have their own character.

So trying to understand voting patterns in suburbs can be complicated. Suburbs closer to big cities tend to lean Democratic and those at the metropolitan edges lean Republican. In the middle, voters can be swayed and are less predictable – indeed, they may be the real swing states for politicians to fight over. This map of the primary results in the New York Times supports these earlier findings: there are different clusters of support for the various candidates throughout the suburban district.

Kaine as VP could bring in needed suburban voters

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VP nominee Tim Kaine is a former big city mayor who has successfully attracted voters in metropolitan areas:

As the former mayor of Richmond, Kaine is the first (relatively) big-city mayor on either party’s national ticket since Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey, the mayor of Minneapolis in the 1940s, as their presidential candidate in 1968.

In that sense, Kaine’s selection symbolizes the Democrats’ growing reliance on—and dominance of—metropolitan America. Democrats now control the mayor’s office in 23 of the 26 largest cities. The party’s presidential coalition is rooted in the cities and most populous inner suburbs. In 2012, Obama won 86 of the nation’s 100 largest counties, amassing a total advantage over Mitt Romney in them of nearly 12 million votes, according to calculations by the Pew Research Center. That allowed Obama to win comfortably, even though Romney won more than three-fourths of all the nation’s counties; the 100 largest counties alone provided nearly half of the president’s total votes…

“By the time he ran for governor in 2005, Kaine had his model and it made sense for a Richmond mayor to run this way: He ran as a polished, well-educated suburban/urban candidate,” said Larry Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. Sabato moderated a televised debate between Kaine and Kilgore and remembers being “stunned” at the contrast in styles. “Kilgore was the favorite and he was supposed to win,” Sabato recalled. “But he came across as the southwest Virginian he had once been. He had the southwest Virginia twang; he was not particularly polished. Kaine was so dominant it was almost embarrassing at times; I felt as the moderator I almost had to stop [the fight].”…

Clinton and Kaine will be counting on this same pattern of strong metropolitan showings to offset what could be a stampede toward Trump in non-urban areas far beyond Virginia. The same equation is key to the Democrats’ hopes in other competitive Sunbelt states like Colorado, North Carolina, Nevada, and Florida, as well as familiar Rustbelt battlegrounds like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Iowa. “The Virginia model,” says Sabato, “is now the national Democratic model.”

Recent presidential cycles have had Democrats solidly winning cities, Republicans solidly winning rural areas, and the two parties fighting over suburban voters (Republicans winning the exurbs, Democrats winning inner-ring suburbs). Both their efforts thus far – Trump on law and order and Clinton on making the country fairer for the working and middle class – could be viewed as efforts to appeal to these middle suburbanites. What exactly do suburbanites want these days from candidates? Good jobs and schools? Safety? Access to the American Dream? The outcome of this election may just hinge on who is best able to move beyond their reliable geographic bases and court suburbanites.

The biggest urban problem is that all the major American cities are run by Democrats?

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American cities face a host of problems but one common claim from conservatives is that the biggest issue is that all of them are run by Democrats:

The rapid growth of urban areas, increased population density, and a massive influx of immigrants—accompanying the explosion of manufacturing and commerce during the Gilded Age—hastened the rise of municipal political machines (such as Tammany Hall in New York City), official corruption, labor unrest, and the demographic diversity that continues to this day. Even though Americans’ standard of living generally improved during industrialization (people moved to the cities for a reason), the Progressive movement was in significant part a response to America’s nascent urban problems.

Progressivism is a legacy that endures, as we know, and for good or ill, urbanization has profoundly affected the American experience. Members of ethnic minorities disproportionately reside in U.S. cities, and their local governments are disproportionately (in fact more or less exclusively) in the hands of the Democratic Party. Cities expend substantial taxpayer resources to try to address poverty, crime, air pollution, congestion, substandard housing, homelessness, and the education of non-English speaking students, all of which are not as prevalent in suburban and rural areas.

Cities tend to have large numbers of unionized public employees, high (and rising) taxes and debt (including unfunded pension liabilities), and intrusive regulations. For a variety of reasons, urban residents favor liberal policies—and elect liberals to office—to a greater degree than suburban and rural voters. Some major American cities, such as Detroit, have become dysfunctional fiefdoms, forced into bankruptcy…

Cities present different challenges than they did a century ago, but the current problems are no less dire. Costly and ineffective public education systems, massively under-funded public employee pension plans, law-enforcement failures, high taxes, and uncontrolled spending imperil the security and solvency of America’s cities. Unless these problems are promptly addressed by responsible state reforms, more urban residents will face the tragic plight of Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, and San Bernardino.

Two quick thoughts:

  1. It would be interesting to see a recent example where more conservative policies helped a large city. Perhaps it is simply hard to find a case from today with most big cities having Democrat mayors. Is the historical record kinder? I recently read about “Big Bill” Thompson who was the last Republican mayor of Chicago, leaving office in 1931. He had all sorts of problems and Wikipedia sums up: “He ranks among the most unethical mayors in American history.” Maybe we could look to Rudy Giuliani in New York City who is often credited for helping reduce crime in the city (due to applying broken windows theory) and for strong leadership after the September 11th attacks. But, some of his legacy has been questioned as crime rates dropped in numerous other major cities and such policies may have come at a cost. All together, it is easy for one party to blame the other but why not have a discussion of exactly how Republicans have actually helped cities in recent years?
  2. Cities are complex places which is why they started drawing so much attention from social scientists and others in the 1800s. Having a change in political party of leadership won’t automatically solve issues: how do we tackle neighborhoods that have now been poor for several generations? How about income inequality? Development and economic opportunities throughout big cities and not just in wealthy areas? The presence and activity of gangs? Providing affordable housing? Avoiding police brutality? Maintaining and upgrading critical infrastructure? Again, it is easy to blame one party but these are not easy issues to address – there is a level of complexity that would prove difficult for a mayor of any party.

Democratic McMansion in Maryland

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A newly renovated home in Maryland may just be a Democratic McMansion:

If you are a Democratic politician getting wined and dined in D.C., chances are you’ve spent an evening or two at the Norton Manor, a faux-Old European estate in Potomac, Maryland that arrived seemingly out of nowhere last year. After a six-year renovation, the extravagant Neoclassical McMansion on nine acres, owned by the Indian-American technology entrepreneur Frank Islam and his philanthropist wife Debbie Driesman, is now fêting guests like Vice President Joe Biden and the Afghan ambassador. Apparently all you have to do to get well-connected politicians at your dinner table is build a pastiche of a Gilded Age mansion, an 18th-century French chateau, and (of course!) the gardens of Versailles in a rich suburb of D.C. Fittingly, the couple says they built Norton Manor as a tribute to the American dream. The Washington Post recently profiled the house, unloading a slew of facts about the place. Here now, 10 of the most interesting details:…

10. This couple prefers Democrats. Just this year, they’ve hosted a dinner for Vice President Biden, a fundraiser for Senator Al Franken, and an event for Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, among other important left-leaning politicos…

6. $1.5M was spent on landscaping, and now there are 1,600 boxwoods, 11,000 outdoor lights, several artificial streams, waterfalls, and stone bridges. Also, there’s a backyard teahouse with a koi pond and a reflecting pool…

2. The house was built by GTM Architects, and decorated by DC interior designer Skip Sroka, who is known for his methods for hiding electronic appliances (so as to not detract from faux-Old European flourishes). He spent three years decorating this “American palace,” as he called it in the Washington Post.

Two quick thoughts:

1. This is definitely a mansion, not a McMansion. Given the costs, 40,000 square feet, and the extra features, this is beyond normal McMansion territory. Indeed, I suspect a normal McMansion would definitely not be up to par for hosting important politicians.

2. I thought McMansions were for conservatives? The headline may be playing around with these stereotypes by suggesting that Democrats with money also live in and visit such homes. Going further, I would guess the homes of wealthy Republicans and Democrats may not differ all that much.

2014 Democrats echo 2012 Republicans in arguing political polls are skewed

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Apparently, this is a strategy common to both political parties: when the poll numbers aren’t in your favor on the national stage, argue that the numbers are flawed.

The [Democratic] party is stoking skepticism in the final stretch of the midterm campaign, providing a mirror image of conservative complaints in 2012 about “skewed” polls in the presidential race between President Obama and Republican Mitt Romney.

Democrats who do not want their party faithful to lose hope — particularly in a midterm election that will be largely decided on voter turnout — are taking aim at the pollsters, arguing that they are underestimating the party’s chances in November.

At the center of the storm, just as he was in 2012, is Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com…

This year, Democrats have been upset with Silver’s predictions that Republicans are likely to retake the Senate. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) mocked Silver at a fundraising luncheon in Seattle that was also addressed by Vice President Biden, according to a White House pool report on Thursday.

“Pollsters and polling have sort of elbowed their way to the table in terms of coverage,” Berkovitz said. “Pollsters have become high profile: They are showing up on cable TV all the time.”

This phenomenon, in turn, has led to greatly increased media coverage of the differences between polling analyses. In recent days, a public spat played out between Silver and the Princeton Election Consortium’s Sam Wang, which in turn elicited headlines such as The Daily Beast’s “Why is Nate Silver so afraid of Sam Wang?”

There are lots of good questions to ask about political polls, including looking at their sampling, the questions they ask, and how they make their projections. Yet, that doesn’t automatically mean that everything has been manipulated to lead to a certain outcome.

One way around this? Try to aggregate among various polls and projections. RealClearPolitics has a variety of polls in many races for the 2014 elections. Aggregation also helps get around the issue of celebrity where people like Nate Silver build careers on being right – until they are wrong.

At the most basic level, the argument about flawed polls is probably about turning out the base to vote. If some people won’t vote because they think their vote won’t overturn the majority, then you have to find ways to convince them that their vote still matters.