Where will next year’s presidential election be decided? Florida or Minnesota? North Carolina or Ohio? At this stage, the only honest answer to that question is “who knows?” But what can be predicted with far more confidence is that, in all the states in play, the race will be won or lost in the suburbs.
Suburbia’s significance in American politics was made obvious by last year’s midterms. The blue wave that saw Democrats gain control of the House of Representatives looked more like a tsunami in the suburbs. Republicans went into 2018 holding 69 suburban districts in the House — they ended the year with just 32.
The suburbs matter because, in contemporary American politics, density matters. Travel from a city centre to the country and as the landscape gets sparser, the politics get steadily redder, no matter what part of America you find yourself in. Will Wilkinson, of the Washington think tank the Niskanen Centre, argues persuasively that density is the factor to consider if you want to understand America’s divided politics: “There are really no red states or blue states. There’s compact blue urban density and sprawling red sparseness.”
And according to Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden, population density becomes a stronger predictor of voting behaviour with every election that goes by.
That makes America’s suburbs the country’s decisive ideological battleground, the in-between zones between blue cities and red countryside that will decide the outcome. And if the suburbs matter, then they should be properly understood.
Curtain twitchers, desperate housewives, status anxiety and cul-de-sacs — this is what we think of when we shut our eyes and imagine the suburbs. This picture of stultifying conformity might have started with a grain of truth but has become a gross oversimplification.
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