On population density and election outcomes (oh, and race)

Both the New York Times and National Public Radio are reporting today on the impact of suburban voters in recent elections.  In short, suburban voters are moving to the left, but their positions are often contradictory, and recent shifts are certainly no guarantee suburban voters will stay left.  The primary axis of analysis for these stories is population density, though the NYTimes pieces attends to race secondarily.

The New York Times Upshot feature leads with the big news out of Orange County, California in the 2018 mid-term elections:  no part of the county will be represented by a Republican congressperson in the coming session, and it's the first time that's happened since 1940.

The NYTimes quotes Lily Geismer, a historian at Claremont McKenna College in California:

There is this idea that if all these suburban areas are blue, that will mean they’re automatically more progressive.

Geismer suggests that phenomenon is "an indication of something more progressive, she said, but underneath are “still commitments to a lot of kinds of inequality.”  The story provides these specific examples: 

[F]urther down the ballot in Orange County, voters also considered several propositions meant to ease the state’s housing crisis. Orange County voters opposed a bond to fund housing assistance programs, which passed statewide. And they rejected a rent-control measure by a wider margin than the rest of the state (the measure failed).

Thus, the New York Times concludes, "Newly Democratic Orange County is not exactly on its way to becoming liberal San Francisco."

[Geismer's] research on suburban Democrats identified many who supported liberal agendas in Washington while opposing affordable housing or school desegregation in their own communities. That dissonance reflects the particular politics of many suburban communities — politics that have made them a national battleground.

This reminds me of Edsall's piece, "The Democrats' Gentrification Problem" and David Brooks' recent piece, "The Rich White Civil War." 

The NPR story breaks things down region by region, focuses on suburban seats that flipped across the nation, including suburbs of Atlanta, Memphis, Denver, Oklahoma City, Minneapolis, Chicago, Rochester, Jacksonville, San Bernardino County, Austin and Houston, among others.  Both stories feature some cool maps/infographics, and those are well worth a look.  The New York Times infographic breaks the analysis into six categories of places (as designated by CityLab) based on population density:  rural, rural-suburban, sparse suburban, dense suburban, urban-suburban, and urban.  The Times observes:   

After this election, there are no truly urban congressional districts represented by Republicans in Congress. The last and only one to flip was New York’s 11th, covering Staten Island and part of southern Brooklyn. Florida’s 25th, west of Miami, is the densest Republican district left.

And rural areas, the Times concludes, are now reliably Republican.  As for me, I'm still not sure why that is so--is it stasis and tradition? economic threat?   The story says rural voters focus on "individualism and limited government," which is certainly the stereotype.

The New York Times story mentions race only a few times--specifically, whiteness:

... changing nature of the suburbs and the changing preferences of white college-educated voters there who are repelled by the president.

... many highly educated, white suburban voters disagree with the Republican Party than the economic issues on which they’re better aligned.

The last paragraph of the story mentions "rural communities and white working-class voters" as similar, if not synonymous.

The story references minorities--presumably racial/ethnic minorities--twice:

.... as long as Republicans continue to seem uninterested in courting minorities...

and observing that well-off suburban voters' economic interests

simply aren’t aligned with poorer, minority Democratic voters who want more affordable housing, integrated schools or services funded by higher taxes. 

A NYTimes story about the health (or lack thereof) of the Democratic party in the American Midwest is here.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.