Will soccer moms win it for Kamala? The election will be won in the suburbs

Just as important, the electorate of swing states tend to be concentrated in the suburbs of big cities. There are plenty of examples here, from Raleigh (North Carolina) and Detroit (Michigan) and Atlanta (Georgia). Or else there’s my native Wisconsin. Outside Milwaukee sit the three suburban counties of Washington, Ozaukee, and Waukesha — together known as “WOW” — and which are home to over 600,000 Wisconsinites or roughly 10% of Wisconsin’s population. Philadelphia, for its part, has its own version of the WOW phenomenon, where its four so-called “collar” counties are among the richest and most educated in the state, and indeed boast more people than Philly and Pittsburgh combined.

Beyond the raw population figures, the suburbs matter because of how residents vote. Unlike both their rural and urban cousins, voters in the suburban mass are split basically down the middle between the two parties. And if that makes them worth courting whatever your politics, that’s equally clear from recent electoral cycles. Traditionally, Wisconsin’s WOW counties have been Republican stalwarts. In the Trump era, though, the GOP is winning those areas with eroding margins — meaning falling numbers in the suburbs hit the Republican haul statewide. “As always, Trump’s personally still not strong in the ‘burbs themselves,” a GOP strategist in Wisconsin tells me, “but his appeal in exurban areas remains strong, and he is really gaining rural and small town votes still.” As for the Democrats, they add, the party is “holding strong” in urban areas like Milwaukee and Madison, even as they’re also gaining ground in more suburban areas.

Over in Pennsylvania, Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 was partly the function of his popularity in those Philly collar counties, and indeed corrected for his underperformance in the City of Brotherly Love itself. It helped that Biden was both a native Pennsylvanian with blue collar fluency and a change candidate running against the pandemic economy. Yet if Harris is in a relatively less comfortable position — running as the sitting vice president and amid dissatisfaction over both the economy and the border — the consequences of Covid may actually help her in suburbs further south.

In North Carolina, for instance, the pandemic has led many Left-leaning voters to escape their small urban apartments and settle in the suburbs of towns like Charlotte or Greensboro, a phenomenon which may have permanently altered the electorate. As analysis by Bloomberg found, those counties that have seen the “highest population growth shifted toward Democrats between 2016 and 2020 — including many suburban counties that voted for Donald Trump in the last election”.

“Similar shifts are playing out in Arizona, Georgia and other key battlegrounds for next week’s race,” Bloomberg added. “It’s a continuation of a trend from 2020, when the suburbs decided the election.” Certainly, it’s something Parker Short has noticed too. “I have seen this shift in the suburbs firsthand”, explains the president of the Georgia Young Democrats, who grew up in Dunwoody, an affluent suburb of Atlanta named after a Confederate officer. “Since 2016, my town has gone from having all Republican local elected officials to all Democrats.”

As that reference to 2016 implies, one important factor here involves the distaste many suburbanites feel for Trump’s more vulgar tendencies. That’s especially true in Georgia: Short says that the Atlanta suburbs largely turned blue after Trump rejected the 2020 election results, and attacked local GOP officials. That’s echoed by anecdotal evidence too. “While I was in line to vote,” Short says, “an older white couple behind me confided in me that they were voting for Kamala Harris, and were lifelong Republicans.”

And if that explains why Harris has relentlessly campaigned on a platform of “democracy” — using Republican stalwarts like Liz Cheney to convince erstwhile conservatives to go blue for the good of the republic — it’s a similar story at the local level. In Stafford County on Saturday, amid Virginia’s sprawling suburbs, a three-hour line snaked around the sidewalk at one polling place. It was the last day to vote early and Democrats had dispatched the wives of Senator Tim Kaine and Eugene Vindman to work the line. That latter choice is telling: apart from being a candidate for the House of Representatives, Eugene Vindman is also the twin brother of Alexander, who became a liberal darling after testifying against Trump during his first impeachment. As Vindman’s wife told voters: “What he really stands for is service.”

Beyond an abstract commitment to the Constitution, meanwhile, Harris’s focus on Trump’s supposed threat to the rule of law matters for more pragmatic reasons too — especially when it comes to suburban America. To quote one Democratic strategist, the party really needs to “persuade ‘traditional/establishment’ Republican voters writ large, and that is really more about improving the margin with college-educated voters, many of whom are suburban women, because not only is [Harris] losing non-college-educated voters by huge margins, but she’s also not doing as well with traditionally democratic groups like young people and people of colour”.

Together with internal migration and disgust at Trump, though, there’s also a third factor that could turn the suburbs blue: gender. As Short points out, indeed, one of the most striking trends in his native Atlanta is how suburban women are moving towards the Democrats. Nor is this particularly hard to understand. Quite aside from Trump’s own dubious behaviour towards women, there’s also the question of abortion. With the Dobbs case no longer guaranteeing the abortion access nationwide, and fierce legal battles over the issue underway in states like Georgia, it’s little wonder that Short suggests it’ll “drive tens of thousands” of women to the polls — though he believes many likely voted blue already.

After Dobbs, Democrats are targeting what they see as the changing the politics of another group: suburban women married to Republicans. As Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist explains, “the big difference in this election are white women who are married to Republican dudes who might be registered Republicans but who want to vote for Kamala Harris.” This, according to Rocha, is because they want to see a woman president, are upset about Dobbs, or identify Trump with obnoxious men they’ve personally known and would never want near the nuclear codes.

Given Rocha’s experience in key states — he’s currently working in Wisconsin, Arizona and Pennsylvania, among other battlegrounds — he’s surely someone worth listening to. Or you could just turn on the TV. Less than a week before election day, a progressive group leant on Julia Roberts. In a pro-Kamala ad, the actor narrated a scene that followed white women into a voting booth. “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know”, Roberts says as the women vote for Harris, return to their husbands, and assure their menfolk they “made the right choice”.

“Remember,” Roberts adds, “what happens in the booth, stays in the booth.” As Rocha explains, that last point speaks to what he calls the “silent vote” — mostly college-educated women who aren’t captured in polling, but who nonetheless plan to vote blue in private. And if Vote Common Group, the group behind the stunt, is spending $30,000 to get Julia Roberts beamed into the homes of women in swing states, the expense is a bet on Rocha’s “silent vote” to tip the scales on Tuesday. With Harris up nine points among women, Democrats are obviously tapping into something real — the question is whether they’re doing it well enough to combat Republican efforts.

Democrats are not the only ones appealing to moderate suburban housewives. Beyond focusing on the usual bugbears around inflation and migration, Republicans are also trying to make inroads by focusing on the creep of progressive radicalism in suburban areas where parent teacher association meetings have been upended by hot button culture battles. “The trans issue has been incredibly powerful — and it’s not just from our research — it’s showing up in everyone’s data”, says Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project, asked particularly about what’s working in the suburbs. “That’s why we are seeing it nonstop during the World Series and almost every college and professional football game.” This is clear enough in practice: in a battleground North Carolina district, encompassing some of Raleigh’s eastern suburbs, Republicans just put money behind an ad depicting the Democratic incumbent in drag, highlighting his support for transgenderism. Schilling, for his part, says his “gut” tells him Trump will do a bit better in suburban counties this time around. Before the midterm elections in 2022, 40% of American women said societal views on gender identity were “changing too quickly”.

Back in Stafford County, Republicans say they’re seeing a similar pattern to Schilling. When I stopped by the GOP’s tent, one middle-aged woman was posing giddily between lifesize cutouts of Trump and RFK Jr. As she watched that happy scene play out behind her, the wife of the local GOP chair told me that both Kennedy and Elon Musk were bringing a lot of people into the party, with women especially keen to vote red this time around. Like Schilling, meanwhile, she said many were particularly worried about extreme gender ideology.

Whoever ends up triumphant, at any rate, things are bound to be close. Biden won Stafford County by fewer than three thousand votes — just over 3% — in 2020. Four years earlier, Trump defeated Clinton by nearly 10 points. Not, of course, that any of this is happening in isolation. About 20 miles south of Stafford, King George County is designated rural by the Commonwealth of Virginia. There, Biden did better than Hillary Clinton, but Trump still won by more than 10 points in 2020 — and with more votes too. To put it differently, then, you don’t have to drive too far from DC’s affluent suburbs to discover country roads dotted with Trump signs. The question Republicans are wondering now is whether those signs, and their owners, will be enough if the GOP finally loses the battle for the suburbs.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington D.C. Correspondent.

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