A TALE OF TWO SUBURBS
Political divide manifests itself in majority Democratic ‘inner ring’ suburbs and heavily Republican ‘outer ring’ areas
DEAST GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. ave Levitt became a Republican after getting his MBA in 1990. Like him, Republicans valued fiscal conservatism, balanced budgets and free trade, “all the things you learn in business school that are good and help people,” Levitt said.
These days, Levitt, a 55-year-old real estate developer, finds himself angry with President Donald Trump and alienated from the party. It is an evolution shared by suburban voters nationally, particularly well-educated ones, like many of his neighbors in East Grand Rapids, an upscale suburb a few miles from downtown Grand Rapids.
Lindsay Kronemeyer, 28, lives about 15 miles further out in another suburb, Dorr Township. An observant Christian and passionate opponent of abortion, Kronemeyer was indifferent at first, but now could not be happier with Trump, a president who she said “is on our side.” Hers is a distinctly suburban story, too. It just depends on which kind of suburb. The political dividing line in the U.S. used to be between cities, which were mostly Democratic, and suburbs, which had long been Republican. But today it runs through the very center of the suburbs themselves, between a densely populated inner ring that is turning blue and a more spacious outer ring that is becoming ever more red.
This is as true in Alabama as it is in New York: Rural places and newer suburbs swung for Trump, while urban places and older suburbs favored Hillary Clinton.
In 2016, those two suburban types fought to a near draw. Clinton beat Trump by 5 million votes in inner-ring suburbs. He countered with a 5.1 millionvote advantage in outer-ring suburbs. This pattern tilted the race toward Trump in smaller cities and toward Clinton in big metro areas.
And for all the talk about Trump turning off suburbanites, to understand U.S. politics, it is necessary to make sense of the two suburban worlds where 60 percent of Americans now live.
The very bones of East Grand Rapids are Republican: Gerald Ford grew up here. But these days it looks a lot like Levitt — more educated and less Republican. It is not as diverse as some neighboring inner-ring suburbs, but it is part of a demographic shift that defies all the traditional notions of suburban voters.
Kronemeyer is part of an equally powerful demographic trend — the rise of outerring suburbs, whose white population has grown by 25 percent since 1990, compared with a 1 percent decline in the inner ring.
While it varies somewhat from region to region, many of these places sprang up on what was, until recently, farmland and still look a lot like the rural areas that form the heart of Trump’s support — whiter, older, less educated. These are also the places that have grown the fastest over the past 25 years.
All of this has put the suburbs at the center of the nation’s political map in 2020. It is also scrambling old patterns. Clinton did better than former President Barack Obama in Texas, Georgia and Arizona, states that have fast-growing suburbs thick with educated voters. In Michigan last year, two Democrats, Haley Stevens and Elissa Slotkin, won suburban districts that Republicans had dominated.
“It was a remarkable change,” said Amy Walter, national editor of the Cook Political Report. “You saw this happen almost across the board from Orange County to Houston, Atlanta, Seattle all in the same year. Suddenly there was no regional difference. It was the nationalization of suburbia.”
Realignment around education
When Levitt moved to East Grand Rapids in 1994, it was almost entirely white and conservative in a Christian Reformed kind of way — the church of the Dutch immigrants who settled here.
“Don’t mow your lawn on Sundays, that kind of stuff,” Levitt said.
Levitt, who is from Chicago, remembers being surprised to discover that even many city workers voted Republican. In 1996, Bob Dole got 57 percent of the presidential vote in East Grand Rapids, far more than the 41 percent he received in the rest of the country.
But that was not unusual. East Grand Rapids was an educated place, and educated Americans tended to be Republicans.
In 1994, 54 percent of white Americans with at least a four-year college degree identified with or leaned toward the Republican Party, according to the Pew Research Center. Just 38 percent associated with the Democratic Party.
But in the early 2000s, the Republican advantage in East Grand Rapids started to shrink. Manufacturing was closing, and a bustling new medical industry had sprung up. Colleges and universities were expanding. Kent County, which includes Grand Rapids and its suburbs, has grown by 14 percent since 2000, and the population has become increasingly more educated.
Educated people were coming in. But something else was happening: Educated people who had been here for a long time were changing. By the early 2000s, white voters without a degree were drifting toward the Republican Party, and white college graduates were going the other way. By 2017, the pattern that Pew identified in 1994 was practically reversed: Just 42 percent of well-educated white voters leaned Republican, while 53 percent preferred the Democrats.
“There has been a dramatic realignment among white voters by education,” said John Sides, one of the authors of Identity Crisis, a book about the 2016 election. “It is not an aberration. It is now a durable new feature of our politics.”
Party preference does not shift suddenly, but slowly as turnoffs accumulate. Levitt kept voting Republican for years, even in 2008 when Kent County went for Obama. Levitt may not have voted for him, but he was glad that someone was trying to do something about health care and climate change. And while he has been hunting with his son, he saw nothing wrong with an assault weapons ban, something Republicans opposed.
The beginning of the end for Levitt was the tea party movement, the rightwing surge whose stated foe was government spending, but which had an angry ethnonationalist edge.
“I thought, ‘These people are not my people,’ ” Levitt said. “I also thought, ‘It’s getting bad.’ ”
Levitt voted for Clinton in 2016. But he does not feel like he fits in the Democratic Party either.
“It’s not like, ‘Oh gee, the Democrats can rejoice because there are more of us flying the Democratic flag,’ ” Levitt said. “No. It’s just that there’s a big group of us out here who are lost.”
That feeling extends to Levitt’s representative in Washington. Justin Amash, the congressman for Michigan’s third district, was the only Republican to call for Trump’s impeachment. He has since left the party.
“It’s like a Jell-O mix that’s still setting,” said Douglas Koopman, a political science professor at Calvin University in Grand Rapids. “There’s been the start of a realignment, but a lot is still up in the air.”
More diverse means more Dems
White college graduates are only part of what is turning some suburbs blue. The other powerful force is rising racial diversity. Nearly 60 percent of all black people now live in suburbs. African Americans, Hispanics and Asians together make up nearly one-third of the suburban population.
That diversity describes Kentwood, one of Grand Rapids’s largest inner-ring suburbs. When Dave and Barb Lubbers moved there in 1969, the Vietnam War was raging and the neighborhood was more than 90 percent white. The first immigrant family they remember — refugees from Vietnam — arrived in 1980. One daughter became a doctor and another a lawyer. “Very successful family,” Barb Lubbers said.
Refugees kept coming, in part because a large refugee agency, Bethany Christian Services, kept bringing them, and because churches, including those the Lubbers belonged to, kept settling them. A softball team from Cornerstone University sponsored a Congolese family. A packaging company sponsored a Burmese family. The local Rotary Club sponsored a family of Iraqis.
Dave Lubbers, a retired bank vice president, has guided a Kenyan refugee through a mortgage application, helped a family from the Democratic Republic of Congo get their hot water turned back on, and most recently taught two Afghans how to drive in his aging Pontiac in a nearby cemetery.
He said helping refugees has been one of the great joys of his life.
These changes have swept politics, too. In 2008, Kentwood tipped blue, and it never went back. Last year, Kentwood elected Monica Sparks, an African American real estate broker, as its county commissioner, a seat that had been mostly Republican for years. Her campaign leaflets were in 12 languages.