Sometimes I worry that I’ll bore people by saying that same things over and over, but there are a couple of areas where I just feel like I have no choice but to keep hammering and hammering because people on the left just seem preternaturally incapable of understanding or accepting my point.
One of those areas is the importance and vulnerability of the Democratic Party’s new and highly unstable urban/suburban coalition. I think people are basically familiar with the famous “white flight” suburbs of cities like Detroit and Philadelphia, but I’m going to bring up a slightly different paradigm–Texas.
We haven’t thought much about the suburbs of Texas because the state hasn’t been competitive for a quarter century now. But, as with Philadelphia, the suburbs in Texas are historically rock-solid Republican. That’s no longer the case.
Here’s Senator Ted Cruz to explain the current dynamics of Texas politics.
“Historically, the cities have been bright blue and surrounded by bright red doughnuts of Republican suburban voters,” Cruz said. “What happened in 2018 is that those bright red doughnuts went purple — not blue, but purple. We’ve got to do a more effective job of carrying the message to the suburbs.”
I’d compare this to what happened in Pennsylvania throughout the latter half of the aughts. At first, the Philly suburbs became competitive and the Democrats took a couple of historically Republican congressional seats in 2006. Then the suburbs became a key source of strength for Obama in 2008. By 2016, Clinton was crushing in the suburbs and the Democrats were winning local offices that had been in Republican hands since the Civil War.
We can see that Texas has already begun this process.
A Quinnipiac poll released in June found that 48 percent of Texans approved of Trump’s job performance while 49 percent said they disapproved. That poll also found that Trump is effectively tied in Texas with several of the top contenders in the Democratic race.
Beyond the strong turnout for [Beto] O’Rourke last year, Democrats point to other 2018 contests as evidence of an upswing, including two U.S. House seats that flipped from red to blue and more than a dozen state legislative gains.
The most common explanation for the Democrats’ surge in Texas is that it is undergoing demographic change, usually understood as a quickly growing Latino population, as well as a big influx of Asian/Indian Americans. But it’s also seeing big growth in the suburbs as people relocate there from other states to take white-collar jobs. As a result of this diversification, the Texas suburbs are beginning to resemble suburbs we see elsewhere, especially in the north. And they’re finding common ground politically with urban populations who oppose race-based politics and other aspects of “the Culture War.”
It’s this fusion of the Texas cities with their suburbs that is making the state competitive a little earlier than expected based on changes in the racial composition of the state alone. Ted Cruz recognizes the threat, and he also recognizes the remedy: “We’ve got to do a more effective job of carrying the message to the suburbs.”
But these suburbs are not listening to the GOP’s racism or their dismissal of science as “fake news.” They don’t really have “conservative values” anymore, except on things like high taxes and big government. The Republicans’ only realistic chance to make inroads in the suburbs is to depict the Democrats as looking out only for their urban base. So, they’ll argue that the Democrats will take away people’s employer-based health care in order to provide government health care to lazy, poor people in the cities. They’ll argue that the Democrats will take suburban tax money and spend it on health care and education for illegal border crossers. They’ll argue that they’ll spend suburban tax money on a reparations program for the descendants of slaves. They’ll argue that the Democrats won’t secure the borders at all and will invite in hordes of unskilled people who will compete for low-wage jobs, commit violent crimes, and use suburban tax dollars to feed themselves.
These are really the same kinds of things Republicans have always told the suburban voter, usually with great success. It’s actually very unnatural for the suburbs and the cities to align politically, and that’s why this coalition is fragile and vulnerable. It’s easier for the GOP to tap a wedge here than for the Democrats to tap a wedge between Wall Street financiers and evangelical Christians. In both of these examples, though, the effective work is usually self-inflicted. Republicans have lost states like New Jersey and Connecticut that are filled with people who work in financial services, insurance, pharmaceuticals and advertising because they’ve tried to impose a southern culture on the whole country. These voters aren’t voting for the Democrats out of financial self-interest. They just have nothing in common with people like Tom DeLay or Louie Gohmert.
The worst thing a Democratic candidate can do with these suburban voters is to attack the industries they work in and threaten to tax them to death. That might make sense on the merits, especially if you’re unhappy with cost of prescription drugs or angry about how trade policy and vulture capitalism have gutted the middle class and destroyed our manufacturing base. But the Democrats are losing so badly among rural, small-town, and white working class voters, that they are now dependent on the suburbs.
I pleaded with the Democrats not to go down this route and to work harder to hold on to their farmer/labor white working class base, but the Republicans have won that battle mostly through pure ruthlessness. By racializing our politics, the GOP has succeeded in peeling off lower income voters who really should not be in a coalition with bankers and upper management. The Democrats could find ways to fight back, and I’d say that Bernie Sanders and especially Elizabeth Warren are making an effort, but they certainly can’t rely on that to put them over the top in 2020.
For now, they’re stuck with their urban/suburban alliance, which means that they have to make sure they’re gaining ground in the suburbs rather than losing ground.
Now, I hear people say all the time that the Republican will accuse the Democrats of doing things even if they are not doing them. That’s true. But when the accusation is accurate it is far more convincing, especially among reality-based suburban voters. If the accusation is on video tape, it’s potentially devastating.
As I pointed out to Armando of Daily Kos, the binary between base turnout and undecided persuasion is badly misunderstood by most people. Persuasion is not in any necessary way about getting people to agree with your party. It can just as easily be about persuading people not to support the other party. Negative campaigning, as Armando says, “is the most effective persuasion work ever invented.”
Okay. Words have meaning, but sometimes it works to simplify.
Simple binary: turnout model is about convincing people to vote.
Persuasion model is about getting voters to vote for you.
In the first, people agree with you. In the second, that’s not necessary.
— Martin Longman (@BooMan23) August 2, 2019
I think I agree.
— Martin Longman (@BooMan23) August 2, 2019
Of course, Armando made that comment as if it were a rebuttal. But white collar, professional suburban voters whose families have voted Republican since the Civil War are not sold on the Democratic Party. They just hate Trump and they’re not too fond of the current iteration of the GOP. They’ll vote against him unless persuaded that the Democrat is worse. And there’s really only one way the Democrat could be worse than Trump, and that’s if they’re perceived as personally hostile and a threat to their livelihood.
This is exactly what Trump will argue is the case, and if he has some justification in saying it it will be many magnitudes more effective than if it just seems like another of his wild conspiracy theories.
The Democrats have to be very protective of their suburban base, and they are not showing any cognizance of this fact at all. Instead, they’re convinced that the road to victory is to fire up young voters and their urban base. If this is attempted in a way that loses suburban votes, it’s going to be a wash at best on the presidential level, and an outright danger to suburban members of Congress.
I never wanted an urban/suburban alliance because I did not want to have to pander to suburban sensibilities, but that’s what this next election will be fought over. Can the Democrats prevent the GOP from driving a wedge there? If they can, they will win. If they can’t, they could win the popular vote by a lot and still lose to Trump and lose control of the House of Representatives.
As for Texas, the Democrat could actually win that state in 2020. But that will likewise require that the suburbs go blue rather than remain purple.
Then Pelosi’s House should be working to pass bills on immigration reform and ACA fine-tuning/improvement so that it is crystal clear what a Dem prez of any stripe is gonna have to accept should Dems be given control of the government. You basically are pleading for an overall strategy now to calm the nervous newbie suburbanites, so someone with some actual power needs to start imposing some order on the proceedings, given that we have decided to start the cattle-call prez campaign a year or so early. Obviously the worthless corporate media is looking to play up the “Dems Wildly Lib’rul and in Disarray!” angle, since they have precious little interest in documenting the nation’s slide into actual fascism and plutocracy, dutifully parroting every Trumperian Tweet without comment, let alone refutation.
Dems are the competent legislative party, they should be able to accomplish this (while impeaching Der Trumper to boot), just as they have already done with election reform. It’s the “conservative” movement/party which has no ability or interest in enacting actual legislation, just “Sieg-Heil”-ing their WH strongman or blowing the government up when there is a Dem prez.
I hesitate even to bring it up, because the gist of Martin’s piece is still very much valid, but much of the shift in Texas suburbs has really just been a matter of urban populations getting pushed out into the inner ring suburbs. The wall of Republican voters that once lived in North Dallas has simply kept moving north, through Richardson and Plano to Frisco and McKinney. So essentially the “cities” are just geographically bigger, and will continue to get that way.
This is the unintended consequence of governing such that only a few share in our economic growth. People tend to vote like their neighbors, and when they can no longer afford to live among affluent suburbanites…
Even in my little slice of suburbia in western NY, the local Democrats have made inroads. They have taken pains to distinguish themselves from the local R’s and the urban Democratic machine by being squeaky clean, and immediately stomping out any whiff of corruption. They also come across as reasonable, and responsive to public opinion. When compared with the typical local R candidate who says crazy stuff caught on tape, it’s an easy choice for a lot of sane people.
Right now, in this political moment, being a good person and letting voters know that (which is often hard since it feels like bragging) might just be enough to win the suburbs. Contrast to the batshit crazy coming from the R’s, and sane people might not even consider the R candidate.
Thanks for this. I just want to echo the importance of your (Armando’s?) final insight: negative campaigning is the most effective persuasion work ever invented.
In the vast majority of cases, Democrats don’t get Republicans and Republican-leaning voters to vote for them because Republicans feel good about voting for a Democrat; they get Republicans and Republican-leaning voters to vote for them because a certain number (5%? 10%? rarely more) of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters are so disgusted (by the collapsing economy & W’s botched wars in 2008, by (we hope) Trump’s racism & buffoonery in 2020) that they can’t bring themselves to vote Republican even though that’s what they want to do and what they’ll return to doing as soon as they can rationalize it.
The same is true for Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters. That’s a big part of how Trump won in 2016—by ceaseless negative campaigning that eventually persuaded a small but crucial number of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters that they couldn’t vote for Clinton this year.