What is the suburban realignment to Democrats really made of?

What is the suburban realignment to Democrats really made of?

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

July 19, 2021|Updated today at 5:17 p.m. EDT

There’s a fair amount of agreement in both parties that the 2022 elections will turn in part on a key question: How durable is the suburban realignment toward the Democratic Party?

Republicans appear to be betting they can reverse Democratic gains among suburbanites alienated by Donald Trump, which powered Democratic takeovers of the House in 2018 and the White House in 2020.

Republicans of course think issues such as critical race theory, immigration and crime are the gunpowder to make this happen. Endless GOP attacks over those topics are supposed to frighten suburbanites back into the GOP fold.

But new polling from a GOP-aligned group suggests Republicans want to spin the idea that overreach on President Biden’s economic agenda will also win them back suburbanites.

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Punchbowl News reports that Republicans are circulating polling of 51 House battleground districts by the American Action Network, a group behind the House GOP. Punchbowl says the findings will “frame the way they talk about economic issues.”

Several findings jump out: 59 percent of registered voters in these districts believe increased unemployment benefits will hurt the recovery because they are a disincentive for lower-wage workers to return to work. The poll carefully highlights that this includes 54 percent of college-educated women, a key swing demographic.

The poll also finds that 53 percent of battleground voters say government spending under Biden is driving up the cost of living. Here we’re told 59 percent of “middle class” voters agree.

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You shouldn’t place much stock in findings from partisan polling. What’s really important about this is that Republicans want to create the impression that spending on unemployment benefits and other government programs constitutes a big vulnerability for Democrats, including among educated and middle class voters.

We’re talking mainly about suburban voters here, because around two-thirds of the two dozen districts held by the most vulnerable House Democrats are in suburban areas.

Here’s why this is important. It’s often argued that in reaching out to relatively affluent and educated suburban voters, Democrats have anchored themselves to a constituency that will turn on them if they govern in an ambitiously progressive way on the economy.

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Republicans now seem to want to put this to the test. The idea is supposed to be that affluent voters alienated by Trump will be driven back to the GOP by too much government spending and its supposed role in driving inflation and in discouraging workers from returning to work.

Putting aside how this undercuts the claim that the GOP is a “working class party” — their argument is essentially that government help for unemployed workers is a no-no because it gives them more bargaining power over their return to the job — is there any reason to believe this?

Political scientist David A. Hopkins, who did a great study of the 2018 elections and the suburban shift to Democrats, says the claim lacks evidence.

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Hopkins notes that the idea is grounded in a simplistic picture of the “typical suburban voter as someone who leans conservative on economics but was alienated from the Republican Party by Trumpist cultural concerns.”

However, Hopkins tells me “there isn’t a lot of hard evidence” that “suburban professionals” who have moved to backing Democrats are a “constituency demanding less liberal economics.”

Remember, the suburban shift occurred while Democrats campaigned in 2018 against repeal of the Affordable Care Act and against Trump’s big tax cut for the rich and corporations. Biden also won the suburbs in 2020 in part on those issues. Though visceral hatred of Trump was a big driver, those stances surely helped.

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“I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence that the new Democratic voters in the big metro-suburbs are in any significant way out of step with Biden-style economic policy,” Hopkins told me.

On top of that, Republicans are casting these policies as overreach, even though they were launched amid two of the biggest crises — on public health and the economy — of the modern era.

What’s more, GOP cultural appeals are likely to continue overshadowing economic attacks. Indeed, as Ronald Brownstein notes, it’s often assumed that culture warring uniformly galvanizes Republicans voters, but cultural battles also energize key groups in the Democratic coalition.

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And those increasingly include educated professionals and suburbanites. As Hopkins noted, Republicans may struggle to “keep together a coalition” that is supposed to include both conservative activists “who respond to cultural red meat” and “white collar professionals who are more culturally progressive.”

Even if this proves correct, Republicans can of course still win the House. Indeed, they’re probably counting on winning it by recapturing only a sliver of suburbanites while juicing up the base and banking on extreme gerrymanders to do the rest.

But one thing is clear: The next elections will probe just how durable this shift among Democratic-voting suburbanites really is, and whether they’re really fated to be alienated by Biden’s progressive economic agenda, as we keep hearing.