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The Suburbs — All Kinds Of Suburbs — Delivered The House To Democrats
https://fivethirtyeight.com/feature...the-house-to-democrats/?ex_cid=story-facebook
So how exactly did the suburbs help make a Democratic majority possible? Using CityLab’s neighborhood density categorizations, we can place all 435 districts into six groups that range from “Pure Rural” to “Pure Urban” and get a sense of which types of seats mattered most to Democrats. The two categories we’re most interested in are “Sparse Suburban” and “Dense Suburban.” “Sparse Suburban” covers districts in outer-ring suburbs at the edge of major metropolitan areas, like the Virginia 10th, which sits outside of Washington, D.C. “Dense Suburban” districts, on the other hand, are those where people are packed in more tightly in mostly inner-ring suburbs and some urban areas, like the California 25th, which falls in the Los Angeles metro area. And as the table below shows, Democrats are poised for a net gain of 27 seats from these two categories, which is four more than they needed to gain a majority.2 In other words, 75 percent of Democrats’ gains came from these predominantly suburban districts.
In addition to doing well in the two predominantly suburban categories, Democrats also grabbed eight seats in the two other categories with some suburban characteristics: five in the more densely populated “Urban-Suburban” category and three in the less densely populated “Rural-Suburban” group. And Democrats have nearly eliminated the GOP from the “Urban-Suburban” group, leaving only Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart in the Florida 25th, at least for now — Republican Rep. Mimi Walters could still hold on to the uncalled California 45th, which is also in the “Urban-Suburban” group.
But where things get really interesting is when we look at how these districts voted for president in 2012 and 2016 alongside their neighborhood characteristics. Of the 27 Democratic gains in predominantly suburban districts, nine came from Romney-Clinton districts. And while it is certainly notable that Democrats captured nearly all of the Romney-Clinton seats,3 the group of suburban seats that provided the largest share of Democratic gains were actually Romney-Trump seats. Democrats gained a net of 12 such seats, including flipping 10 predominantly suburban districts. That should not come as a total surprise — after all, there are 207 Romney-Trump districts compared to 13 Romney-Clinton districts. Still, the Romney-Trump seats have been consistently more GOP-leaning in recent years and are therefore harder for a Democrat to pick up.