Tag Archives: voters

Recent book details the “new swing states” of suburbia

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Richard Florida describes the findings from a recent book titled The Political Ecology of the Metropolis that looks at the swing votes available in American suburbs:

Sellers and his colleagues analyze the political characteristics of cities and suburbs across many advanced nations. Sellers’s own chapter covers the U.S., and it includes some eye-opening insights. While most previous research has looked mainly at states and counties, Sellers has developed a detailed data set on the municipalities that make up America’s metro regions. He tracks the political geography of the 1996, 2000 and 2004 elections across twelve U.S. metros with populations of at least 450,000: New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Seattle, Cincinnati, Fresno, Birmingham, Syracuse, Wichita, and Kalamazoo.

Democrats have a “decisive” advantage in dense, urban localities and poorer, majority-minority suburbs. In the affluent suburbs, Sellers explains, “Republicans enjoy an analogous, if less dramatic” advantage. He notes that “a pervasive divide separates the Republican low density areas of metropolitan peripheries from the Democratic urban centres and minority suburbs.” At the broad metropolitan level, votes follow the same red/blue, rich/poor pattern identified by Larry Bartels and Andrew Gelman at the state level. Sellers found that municipalities with educated and affluent voters tended to vote with their state’s winners – they voted more Republican in red states and more Democratic in blue states.

With these bases locked down, the key political footballs – the new “swing states,” so to speak – are the swelling ranks of economically distressed suburbs, where poverty has been growing and where the economic crisis hit especially hard. There are now more poor people living in America’s suburbs than its center cities, and as a recent Brookings Institution report found, both Republican and Democratic districts have been affected by this reality…

America’s new metropolitan geography is overlaid by one additional factor: voter participation. Turnout levels have ranged between 52 and 62 percent over the past several national elections. Even though Democrats have the clear advantage in raw numbers, Republicans dominate the kinds of communities where people are more likely to actually vote. Turnout, Sellers finds, tends to be higher in GOP strongholds – the more affluent, highly educated suburbs and low-density rural and exurban areas, all places with higher levels of home-ownership.

See earlier posts on Joel Kotkin’s analysis of swing votes in the suburbs. The candidates should know this as well and we should see a lot of visits in the future to such suburbs.

These economically distressed suburbs, often inner-ring suburbs adjacent to big cities but also more far-flung places that are more working class and not as dependent on white-collar and professional work, may hold more than just the political key to metropolitan regions. While wealthier residents batten down the hatches in nicer suburbs and trendy urban neighborhoods, what happens to the majority of residents who face fewer prospects?

Gun control legislation to move forward due to the support of suburban politicians?

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Here is an interesting theory on how the gun control debate may turn out: suburban politicians could tilt the discussion in certain directions.

More recently, Democrats appear to have found a different source of bipartisan support for significant new gun control: otherwise right-leaning politicians who represent suburban constituents. Lawmakers from Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Virginia have recently warmed to new gun legislation. As Philip Rucker and Paul Kane propose in the Washington Post:

The shift underscores a new reality of gun politics in America: The rapid growth of suburbs in historically gun-friendly states is forcing politicians to cater to the more centrist and pragmatic views of voters in subdivisions and cul-de-sacs as well as to constituents in shrinking rural hamlets where gun ownership is more of a way of life.

The growing political influence of the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh suburbs in particular may have something to do with Republican Sen. Patrick Toomey’s sudden involvement in forging a compromise. Something similar is happening in the rapidly expanding suburbs of Virginia, a state where politics are dramatically different in the Blue Ridge than they are in the D.C. suburbs (the NRA’s national office also happens to be located right in the heart of the Northern Virginia suburbs). In gun-friendly Georgia, Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns is betting on pro-gun control TV ads airing in the Atlanta region.

Rucker and Kane again:

Unlike every other debate that has unfolded recently in a bitterly divided Washington, the gun debate is much more about geography than party. The dividing lines are not between Democrats and Republicans, but between rural lawmakers and those who must cater to urban and suburban constituencies.

This is interesting but it isn’t new in American politics: with the majority of Americans now live in suburbs, there are plenty of voters in the suburbs who could go one or the other depending on the issue or election. Indeed, the past presidential elections have hinged on the suburban vote as big cities have voted Democratic and rural areas have voted Republican. There are splits within the suburban vote based on geography: those closer to big cities, living in places like inner-ring suburbs that face many big city issues lean more Democratic and suburbs further out and the exurbs lean Republican.

I think we could also flip the causal direction in this argument: suburban politicians could indeed influence the gun control debate one way or another but, more broadly, couldn’t suburban politicians throw their weight around if they could agree? Some might argue American politics in the last 60 years or so has already been dominated by suburban interests (think interstate highways, the emphasis on the middle class, etc.) but imagine a suburban lobby that doesn’t just mediate between urban and rural politicians but dictates the main terms.

Is it worth holding local elections for less than 15% turnout?

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The Daily Herald asks whether the low turnout for Tuesday’s local elections in the Chicago area means the elections should not be held:

Voter turnout Tuesday was so poor area election officials were calling the effort a waste of tax dollars…

Numbers show no county in the area managed even a 15 percent turnout. Suburban Cook County faired the best overall with a 13.8 percent turnout, according to the summary report available online. Much of even that low number is attributable to interest in the special primary to replace Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. In other places, such as Palatine Township, the top vote-getter was township clerk candidate Lisa Moran with a mere 1,612 votes.

Without a Congressional draw on the ballot, Lake County logged a turnout of a little more than 11 percent. The low total left Lake County Clerk Willard Helander scratching her head…

In DuPage County, a narrowly focused ballot fueled a 3.9 percent voter turnout, officials said. Tuesday’s primary affected voters in only two precincts who could make a choice between five candidates for Aurora Ward 9 alderman…

Kane County Clerk Jack Cunningham took that sentiment one step further. His county logged a 2.9 percent turnout. That works out to about one vote cast per minute in all of the county for the entire election day, Cunningham said. That’s not enough to justify the cost of running the election.

Those are some low turnout totals. To be honest, I didn’t even know there was anything to be voted on in DuPage County and I keep up with local news and regularly read the newspaper. If it hadn’t been for some of the coverage of New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg giving money in the race for Jesse Jackson Jr.’s former seat, I may not have known anything was being voted on.

Some obvious points (to me):

1. Why not vote for these offices and other matters during bigger elections? Yes, this may mean there is more for voters to consider at a time and it is hard to keep up with it all, but at least people would have more of an idea to vote.

2. In response to the low turnout, one county clerk asked whether people care about their local government. My short answer: no, not really. Most communities don’t generate the kind of involvement or major issues that consistently divide the community that would drive people to vote. Even in talking to local public officials, some of them will tell you that they got involved in local government because they saw something they wanted to change and then got involved.

3. I would love to see this story include some data about local voter turnout over time. We know that election turnout has dropped even with the bigger elections. What about these smaller elections? Is there a “golden age” when people used to care more about local government and voted?

Data suggests cities, suburbs, and rural areas divided about Obama

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Recent data continues to suggest President Obama has quite different levels of support across cities, suburbs, and exurbs:

But the most important Obama divide to keep your eye on this year is the one between urban, suburban and rural places.

Urban America is still strongly in Mr. Obama’s corner, 66% say they are optimistic or satisfied. That’s down from 2009’s 74%, but not sharply. The suburbs have grown more skeptical with only 48% saying they are in the optimistic/satisfied camp. In 2009, 63% of the people in suburbs were feeling positive about Mr. Obama’s first term. And rural America is particularly gloomy about the next four years, with only 35% saying they are optimistic or satisfied. In 2009, 58% in rural America thought Mr. Obama would do a good job in the White House.

This is not a new split; Joel Kotkin, for example, has argued for years that the suburbs are the current battleground for voters as city dwellers tend to lean Democratic and people in rural areas tend to lean Republican. But the persistence of this divide goes beyond a red state, blue state divide that has been at the center of American political discourse for over a decade. It is not just about states, which matter particularly for Congress and electoral votes. Rather there are large divides even within states that lead to all sorts of more local issues about how resources should be allocated and who should be able to make decisions. President Obama is known for calling for a purple America bringing together red and blue states but perhaps he needs to call for an America that bridges the big divides between cities, suburbs, and rural areas.

The closer look at how the Obama campaign used big data to wage an intimate and winning campaign

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In MIT Technology Review, Sasha Issenberg has a three-part look at how the Obama campaign was effectively able to harness big data. Here are the concluding paragraphs from Part Three:

A few days after the election, as Florida authorities continued to count provisional ballots, a few staff members were directed, as four years before, to remain in Chicago. Their instructions were to produce another post-mortem report summing up the lessons of the past year and a half. The undertaking was called the Legacy Project, a grandiose title inspired by the idea that the innovations of Obama 2012 should be translated not only to the campaign of the next Democratic candidate for president but also to governance. Obama had succeeded in convincing some citizens that a modest adjustment to their behavior would affect, however marginally, the result of an election. Could he make them feel the same way about Congress?

Simas, who had served in the White House before joining the team, marveled at the intimacy of the campaign. Perhaps more than anyone else at headquarters, he appreciated the human aspect of politics. This had been his first presidential election, but before he became a political operative, Simas had been a politician himself, serving on the city council and school board in his hometown of Taunton, Massachusetts. He ran for office by knocking on doors and interacting individually with constituents (or those he hoped would become constituents), trying to track their moods and expectations.

In many respects, analytics had made it possible for the Obama campaign to recapture that style of politics. Though the old guard may have viewed such techniques as a disruptive force in campaigns, they enabled a presidential candidate to view the electorate the way local candidates do: as a collection of people who make up a more perfect union, each of them approachable on his or her terms, their changing levels of support and enthusiasm open to measurement and, thus, to respect. “What that gave us was the ability to run a national presidential campaign the way you’d do a local ward campaign,” Simas says. “You know the people on your block. People have relationships with one another, and you leverage them so you know the way they talk about issues, what they’re discussing at the coffee shop.”

Few events in American life other than a presidential election touch 126 million adults, or even a significant fraction that many, on a single day. Certainly no corporation, no civic institution, and very few government agencies ever do. Obama did so by reducing every American to a series of numbers. Yet those numbers somehow captured the individuality of each voter, and they were not demographic classifications. The scores measured the ability of people to change politics—and to be changed by it.

Combining numbers and a personal appeal made for a winning campaign. Part Two has more on how the Romney campaign watched what the Obama campaign was doing and tried to react and yet couldn’t quite figure it out.

Since this appears to have been the winning formula in 2012, I imagine there will be plenty of others who will try to duplicate it. One way would be to get the Obama campaign database and information and it is not clear who might be able to access that in the future. Another way would be to hire some of the Obama campaign people who made this happen – I imagine they will get some lucrative offers moving forward. A third option would be to try to find another way but this could be tedious, require a lot of resources, and may not come to the same conclusion.

Biden and Ryan redefine working class for their own purposes

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Both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions featured efforts to portray their leaders as having blue-collar roots. However, as this analysis points out, these testimonies were working with altered definitions of what it means to be blue-collar.

Merriam Webster’s defines blue-collar labor as “of, relating to, or constituting the class of wage earners whose duties call for the wearing of work clothes or protective clothing.” But the Washington definition of blue-collar is different. From an analysis of punditry, the qualities that define blue collar are being white, being male, being religious — especially Catholic — being from the interior, and having mainstream cultural interests totally unrelated to social class, such as “liking hockey” or “liking 1970s rock music.”…

Actual Blue-Collar Credentials: “My dad never wore a blue collar,” Biden said in June. “Barack makes me sound like I just climbed out of a mine in Scranton, Pennsylvania carrying a lunch bucket. No one in my family worked in a factory.”…

Blue-Collaryness Rating: Worn Chambray. “This campaign, Biden — with his blue collar background — is focusing on helping Obama where the president tends to be weak: in appealing to blue collar and swing state voters,” the Associated Press reported Friday. “One of the weapons used by Obama to court white men is Vice President Joe Biden, who has a kinship with blue-collar voters, particularly in critical battleground states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan,” The Dallas Morning News said Thursday…

Washington Blue-Collar Credentials: Ryan is Catholic, and from a state where there are farms. Ryan likes Led Zeppelin, which is somehow blue collar despite inspiring countless blacklight posters in dorms nationwide. He has other hobbies that require equipment you buy in malls. “I was raised on the Packers, Badgers, Bucks and Brewers. I like to hunt here, I like to fish here, I like to snowmobile here. I even think ice fishing is interesting,” Ryan said on August 12. “I got a new chainsaw… It was nice. It’s a Stihl.” Homeowner Stihl chainsaws run between $179.95 and $359.95 at the local Janesville Stihl dealer. “He is very grounded in roots that weren’t so glamorous coming up in life,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor told PBS before the Republican National Convention.  “And the American people will hear his story tonight, hear how he lost his father and had to work hard and assume hourly wage jobs when he was young.” Yes, friends, Ryan’s Dickinsian youth involved a part-time job at McDonalds. (In fairness, it does not appear that anyone in Washington has ever claimed Eric Cantor has “blue collar appeal.”)

This helps illustrate several points about social class in the United States:

1. Categories of social class can often be quite fuzzy. Often, income is used to mark off different classes but social scientists and the public themselves have difficulty deciding where exactly these boundaries should be drawn. For example, we could also look at how Romney and Obama talk about and promote middle-class values yet neither are currently living middle-class lives according to their income.

2. Social class is not just about having a certain level of income; there is also a cultural dimension, certain behaviors and tastes associated with different classes (a la Bourdieu). For both Biden and Ryan, it sounds like they want to claim some of these cultural markers which plenty of Americans might also share.

3. I wonder how much the media and American voters want to discuss such claims from politicians about social class. Compared to some other countries, Americans are more reluctant to talk about class and sometimes talk and act like it doesn’t even exist. For example, Rick Santorum said on the campaign trail that he didn’t even want to use the term middle-class because it is divisive.

Targeting suburban “Wal-Mart moms” in 2012 elections

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Similar to the 2010 elections and echoing an analysis from November 2011, a commentator suggests the 2012 elections could be decided by suburban “Wal-Mart moms”:

Those voters most likely to remain undecided about their presidential preference are taking on a distinct profile, according to pollsters on both sides of the aisle: They’re suburban white women, between the ages of 35 and 55, who probably haven’t attained a college degree and who have kids under the age of 18. They very likely voted Democratic in 2008, then turned around and voted Republican two years later — if they voted at all. And polling and consumer research shows their focus is on their own household rather than national events…

Bratty and Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster, have extensively surveyed a group they call “Wal-Mart moms,” part of a clever campaign by the retail giant to associate itself with this year’s ultimate swing voter, similar to the oft-cited NASCAR dads of 2004, the soccer moms of 1996 or the hockey moms of 2008. The retailer has avoided getting too specific in terms of race, educational attainment, or geographic area — it defines the women as mothers who are registered to vote, have at least one child under 18 at home, and have shopped at Wal-Mart in the last month — but the group tracks closely with suburban, noncollege whites…

Consumer data backs up that sentiment. Wal-Mart moms are three times more likely than the average American to be interested in family or animated movies, dogs, and products like ketchup, frozen vegetables, and air fresheners, according to data collected by the consumer research firm Lotame. That indicates the women are the ones shopping for their families and are interested in saving pennies wherever they can. They are more interested in information on cruises, too, suggesting they’re eager to get away when their economic situation improves…

With such weighty economic situations on swing mothers’ minds, both pollsters say neither Obama’s nor Romney’s campaign has truly reached these voters yet. And both candidates face challenges in relating: Obama contends with a sense of disappointment that his first term hasn’t sped the economic recovery as much as they expected or that the recovery is leaving them behind. Romney contends with a growing sense that his business experience demonstrates he would favor the wealthy over the middle class.

For all of the talk about big money in elections, the American voter tends to be suburban and working/middle-class people looking for deals at places like Walmart.

One issue I have with analyses like these: they rarely give us the numbers to truly know the size of this group (how many Walmart moms are there really, particularly compared to other cleverly named demographic groups). Additionally, is this group distributed in such a way to really swing an election (in other words, are they located in sizable numbers in the swing states that matter)?

Might Target want to get in on this and start discussing “Target moms”? I assume these might be more educated, slightly more wealthy shoppers…

Republican secret to success: “a rich-poor alliance of affluent suburbs and poor rural counties”

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In discussing the outcome of the recall election in Wisconsin, one analyst argues Republican electoral success is based on combining votes from two geographic areas:

McCabe argues the secret behind Walker and decades of Republican success nationwide is “a rich-poor alliance of affluent suburbs and poor rural counties.” In the recall election, Walker swept Milwaukee’s suburbs by huge margins and dominated the countryside. McCabe says in 2010, “Walker carried the 10 poorest counties in the state by a 13% margin”; these counties used to be reliably Democratic. He elaborates:

“Republicans use powerful economic wedge issues to great impact. They go into rural counties and say, do you have pensions? ‘No.’ Well, you’re paying for theirs, referring to public sector workers. Do you have healthcare? ‘No.’ Well, you’re paying for theirs? Do you get wage increases? ‘No.’ Well, you’re paying for theirs.”

The scenario was far different 50 years ago, explains McCabe:

“The Democrats were identified with programs like Social Security, the G.I. Bill and rural electrification. People could see tangible benefits. Today, they ask, ‘Is government working for us?’ And often their answer is no. They see government as crooked and corrupt. They figure if the government is not working for us, let’s keep it as small as possible.”

Another way to look at this would be to say that Democrats tend to get votes from large cities and less affluent suburbs. This is not the first time this suggestion has been made: Joel Kotkin has discussed how Republicans appeal to suburban voters  and others noted in the 2004 election how George Bush won a clear majority of votes in fast-growing exurban counties.

In the lead-up to the November 2012 elections, when there is commentary about geography, it tends to be about which states are toss-ups between the two candidates. But you can rest assured that the advisers for the candidates are looking at much finer-grained data and how to get more votes from more specific geographic areas like inner-ring suburbs, monied burbs, and the metropolitan fringe. States are too large to analyze quickly: think of Illinois and the differences between Chicago, Chicago suburb, and downstate voters. The analysis in the media could at least be about the areas in the states where there are greater population concentrations. Will Mitt Romney primarily campaign in “affluent suburbs and poor rural suburbs” while Obama will stick to the big cities and middle to lower-class suburbs? Is Romney making a suburban/rural pitch in a majority suburban nation while Obama is promoting a more urban campaign?

President Obama vs. Mitt Romney on dealing with housing crisis

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Even though President Obama and Mitt Romney are not officially running against each other yet, they have presented contrasting plans to deal with the housing crisis. Yesterday, President Obama offered a new “revamped refinancing program” that would help 1 to 1.5 million homeowners:

Under Obama’s proposal, homeowners who are still current on their mortgages would be able to refinance no matter how much their home value has dropped below what they still owe…

At the same time, Obama acknowledged that his latest proposal will not do all that’s not needed to get the housing market back on its feet. “Given the magnitude of the housing bubble, and the huge inventory of unsold homes in places like Nevada, it will take time to solve these challenges,” he said…

Presidential spokesman Jay Carney criticized Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for proposing last week while in Las Vegas that the government not interfere with foreclosures. “Don’t try to stop the foreclosure process,” Romney told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “Let it run its course and hit the bottom.”

“That is not a solution,” Carney told reporters on Air Force One. He said Romney would tell homeowners, “‘You’re on your own, tough luck.'”

How much of these proposals is about looking for votes versus actually seeking out a plan that will help ease dropping home values, foreclosures, and a housing glut?

At the same time, the Washington Post reports that government efforts in recent years haven’t helped much:

President Obama pledged at the beginning of his term to boost the nation’s crippled housing market and help as many as 9 million homeowners avoid losing their homes to foreclosure.

Nearly three years later, it hasn’t worked out. Obama has spent just $2.4 billion of the $50 billion he promised. The initiatives he announced have helped 1.7 million people. Housing prices remain near a crisis low. Millions of people are deeply indebted, owing more than their properties are worth, and many have lost their homes to foreclosure or are likely to do so. Economists increasingly say that, as a result, Americans are too scared to spend money, depriving the economy of its traditional engine of growth.

The Obama effort fell short in part because the president and his senior advisers, after a series of internal debates, decided against more dramatic actions to help homeowners, worried that they would pose risks for taxpayers and the economy, according to numerous current and former officials. They consistently unveiled programs that underperformed, did little to reduce mortgage debts owed by ordinary Americans and rejected a get-tough approach with banks.

Too risky meaning that it was politically untenable when more people are concerned with risk and deficits?

The conversation about housing could play an interesting role in the 2012 elections as both parties look to claim the mantle of defenders of the American middle-class dream of homeownership.

President Obama and Republicans fighting over the votes of the “monied burbs”

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President Obama’s campaign is looking to target voters in the “monied burbs” as part of their broader election strategy:

In his 2008 victory, Mr. Obama broke through among several important voter groups. Exit polls showed that he carried suburbanites, college graduates and those earning more than $200,000.

Mr. Obama won handily in areas that the research organization Patchwork Nation calls “Monied ’Burbs.” Residents of these high-income suburbs, which add up to roughly a quarter of the United States population, tend to be less religious and more tolerant of homosexuality and abortion rights, said Dante Chinni, Patchwork Nation’s director.

They narrowly backed Republicans in the 2010 House elections. Their disappointment over the economy cloud Mr. Obama’s 2012 re-election prospects.

But their distance from the Republican right on social issues gives Mr. Obama a tool for fighting back…

Republicans have their own strong economic arguments for upscale suburbanites, including Mr. Obama’s proposals to raise taxes on households earning more than $250,000. Those will echo Democrats’ 2004 warnings to working-class voters — that social issues obscured how Mr. Bush had hurt their pocketbooks.

The idea of the “monied burbs” was covered in more detail in Our Patchwork Nation. The description in this particular NYT article sounds suspiciously like David Brook’s Bobos, educated suburbanites who are attracted by the suburb’s good schools, single-family homes, and emphasis on family but are more liberal on a number of social issues.

I wonder if we could go so far as to suggest that the suburbs will decide the 2012 elections: will the independent voters in “monied burbs” and inner-ring suburbs vote for President Obama or a Republican challenger? We have some evidence (also here) that these voters helped decide the most recent elections. Does this mean we will have an uptick in rhetoric about the American Dream and homeownership?