https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/opinion/sunday/affluent-suburbs-democrats.html
Turning Affluent Suburbs Blue Isn’t Worth the Cost
By Lily Geismer and Matthew D. Lassiter
Democratic politicians and strategists identify a “suburban revolt” against President Trump and right-wing Republican extremism as the key to victory in the 2018 and 2020 elections. They point to Democratic successes in the off-year 2017 elections in Virginia and New Jersey, and the surprise triumph of Senator Doug Jones in Alabama, as evidence for the party’s plan to target college-educated white women, upper-middle-class moderates and even disillusioned conservatives in the affluent suburbs.
In primary contests last week from California to New Jersey, Democrats pursued that “electability” strategy through the “Red to Blue” project of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which targeted suburban swing voters by clearing candidate fields for moderate and conservative Democrats like Gil Cisneros in Orange County and Jeff Van Drew in New Jersey.
The nomination of centrist candidates may bring Democratic gains in the affluent suburbs in the midterms. But the electoral success of that strategy has previously been modest — and more important, the party has paid insufficient attention to the substantial policy costs of turning moderate and affluent suburbs blue. Democrats cannot cater to white swing voters in affluent suburbs and also promote policies that fundamentally challenge income inequality, exclusionary zoning, housing segregation, school inequality, police brutality and mass incarceration.
The political culture of upscale suburbs revolves around resource hoarding of children’s educational advantages, pervasive opposition to economic integration and affordable housing, and the consistent defense of homeowner privileges and taxpayer rights. Indeed, unlike traditional blue-collar Democrats, white-collar professionals across the ideological spectrum — for example, in the high-tech enclaves of California and Northern Virginia, which combined contain eight of the 15 most highly educated congressional districts in the nation — generally endorse tough-on-crime policies, express little interest in protections for unions and sympathize with the economic agenda of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
The party’s suburban strategy emerged during the 1970s to counter Mr. Nixon’s racially charged appeals to “forgotten Americans.” Politicians like Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts campaigned on an agenda of protecting suburban quality of life, getting tough on crime, cutting middle-class taxes and promoting high-tech corporations. These “Atari Democrats,” along with the Democratic Leadership Council and Bill Clinton, played a key role in shifting the party’s center of gravity from industrial unions and working-class voters to high-tech corporations and postindustrial suburban professionals.
The suburban vote has been closely divided since the 1990s. Barack Obama held his final campaign rally in 2008 in an exurb of Northern Virginia and carried a majority of suburban ballots nationwide.
Yet a majority of white suburbanites live in middle-income places such as Macomb County outside Detroit. An electoral strategy that prioritizes high-tech areas and inner-ring suburbs faces daunting demographic math when applied nationwide. It has left liberalism in a historically weak political position.
Modern liberalism offers less and less to the blue-collar suburbs of Detroit, small towns in Pennsylvania and other working-class and once-unionized areas that have experienced the downside of the postindustrial economy and shocked the political system by voting for Mr. Trump. In 2016, Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, endorsed the party’s suburban priorities with the optimistic forecast that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia.” (Mrs. Clinton was the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose Pennsylvania since Mr. Dukakis in 1988.)
Democrats haven’t paid enough attention to the substantial policy costs of turning affluent suburbs blue. That focus has failed to reverse the downward mobility of middle-income households and openly favored upscale communities without addressing economic and racial inequality.
The Democratic fixation on upscale white suburbs also distorts policies and diverts resources that could generate higher turnout among nonwhite voting blocs that are crucial to the party’s fortunes and too often taken for granted. It should not be that hard for liberalism to challenge the Republican tax scheme to redistribute income upward, and build on Mr. Obama’s important but inadequate health care reform, with policy solutions that address the real diversity of American suburbia.
That strategy would embrace a broad economic platform promoted by progressives like Elizabeth Warren and Stacey Abrams in her race for governor in Georgia.
Democratic strategists seem unable to understand why Mr. Trump carried the upper Midwest or why Hillary Clinton’s suburban strategy generated such unenthusiastic turnout among nonwhite voters. A political agenda fixated on turning affluent suburbs blue is capable of building neither a stable long-term majority nor a policy blueprint worthy of the progressive mantle.
Ms. Geismer is the author of “Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party.” Mr. Lassiter is the author of “The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South.”