Reassessing Suburban Voters

 A lot of what we think about suburban voters is wrong. 

Loudoun County, Va., which became ground zero of stoking panic about education and critical race theory by the incoming governor, Glenn Youngkin, has become an example of many different political ideas, but they can’t be understood outside the local context. In the 1990s, over 80 percent of Loudoun County’s students were white. Today that number has dropped to 43 percent, after a large influx of Asian American and Latino families. Youngkin’s strong showing in Virginia’s suburbs, then, should be seen not only as a triumph of manipulation and messaging by the G.O.P. but also as the most recent nationwide response to demographic changes in the suburbs.

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Youngkin’s strategy exposed oversights and misconceptions within the Democratic Party — its fundamental misunderstanding of Asian American voters and the ways in which it tends to focus on race and inequality in urban areas while mostly ignoring what’s happening right outside city limits.

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a lot of folks who ended up in the suburbs didn’t move by choice. The central city got too expensive. So the rents and tenements that used to be accessible to low-income people, those got snapped up. In Detroit they got turned into downtown lofts. And many low-income people started to move outside the city because that’s where affordable housing was.

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We know that now, in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, the majority of Black residents live in the suburbs. Now the majority of immigrants live in the suburbs. Now the majority of Latinx and Asian Americans live there. But most news media, when they say “suburban,” they mean “white.”

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it also raises the question of what coalition politics are going to look like. So many folks have assumed, because the suburbs are becoming more Black, more brown, more poor, that they’re just going to vote straight-line Democrat. And I think when we look, we actually see that there are moments in which the Republican Party has made significant inroads in terms of mobilizing suburban voters of color. It varies significantly by racial and ethnic group. Black folks remain solidly Democratic in the suburbs.

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Many residents, across race, have said one of the reasons they left the city was because of the safety net — the safety net was a burden that took more taxes away from them.

There are now more poor people in suburbs than in central cities, which means these problems have cropped back up for these same suburban residents. They have to reckon with the thing that they tried to escape.

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We’re going to be forced to reckon with where people are because the narrative has been marching along for 20 years. We just haven’t been paying attention. You hear it arise more and more around elections, but you’re going to see it when we try to figure out how to deal with national poverty, with food insecurity, with transportation and infrastructure. Because the conversation has exclusively assumed people of color are in cities and white folks are in the suburbs. So I hope that people get shaken out of that misconception. But I think we have another 20 years before that happens.