Dems march deeper into suburbia
PHOENIX — When Katherine Rutigliano and her husband moved away from San Francisco in 2013, they figured they would never meet a fellow Democrat again.
But housing was affordable around Phoenix. No more cramped condo. No more suffocating mortgage payments. No more techboom exhaustion. Everything would be easier for them and their kids in the suburbs — everything, that is, except talking politics with neighbors.
Then came an unexpected visitor at the door. It was a Democratic volunteer rounding up votes ahead of the 2018 Senate election. Rutigliano invited her in and inspected the map on her ipad. She was elated to see all the flashing lights that marked where Democrats lived in her stucco neighborhood on the northern edge of Phoenix.
These San Francisco transplants were not alone.
“It was like Christmas,” said Rutigliano, 37, a mother of three and trained chef who is now sending out mailers for local Democrats.
Rutigliano didn’t realize it, but she had moved her family to what is now the front lines in American politics. Once firmly in Republican control, suburbs like hers are increasingly politically divided — a rare common ground shared by Republicans and Democrats.
As such, they are poised to decide not just who wins the White House this year but also who controls the Senate and the contours of the debate over guns, immigration, work, schools, housing and health care for years to come.
The reasons for the shift are many. Suburbs have grown more racially diverse, more educated, more economically prosperous and more liberal — all factors making them more likely to vote Democratic. But demographers and political scientists are just as likely to point to another trend: density. Suburbs have grown more crowded, looking more and more like cities and voting like them, too.
For decades, an area’s population per square mile has been a reliable indicator of its political tilt. Denser areas vote Democratic, less dense areas vote Republican. The correlation between density and voting has been getting stronger, as people began to sort themselves by ethnicity, education, personality, income and lifestyle.
The pattern is so reliable it can be quantified, averaged and applied to most American cities. At around 800 households per square mile, the blue of Democratic areas starts to bleed into red Republican neighborhoods.
A purple ring — call it the flip zone — emerges through the suburbs.
But the midterm elections of 2018 showed that the flip zone has moved in the era of President Donald Trump, with dramatic consequences. When Democrats across the country penetrated deeper into the suburbs, finding voters farther away from the city, they flipped a net 39 House districts and won a majority of the chamber.
An Associated Press analysis of recent election results and density shows Democrats in Arizona moved the flip zone 2 miles deeper into the suburbs from 2016 to 2018, reaching right to the northern edge of Interstate 101 in Phoenix into areas filled with cul-desacs of homes and backyards large enough for swimming pools. The shift helped them win a Senate seat for the first time in 24 years.
The AP’S analysis essentially maps the challenge Trump and his Republican Party are facing today. Polling shows the president trailing Democrat Joe Biden badly in many key suburbs in battleground states. To hold the White House and control of the Senate, he and his party must stop the flip zone from moving farther out again.
Republicans are working against the recent trend in metros across the country. In 2018 in Milwaukee, the flip zone moved out less than half a mile as Wisconsin elected a Democratic governor. Its distance from city hall grew 2.6 miles in Richmond, Virginia, helping deliver the congressional seat once held by a conservative House majority leader, Eric Cantor.
Many political scientists think the trend toward political segregation has put the Democratic Party at a disadvantage. Its voters are more concentrated in cities. Republicans are dispersed across larger areas, making it easier for that party to draw favorable districts and win a majority of legislative seats even if it loses the total vote count. In 2018, Wisconsin Democrats received 53% of state assembly votes in 2018, yet they hold only 36 of the 99 seats in the chamber. Under the Electoral College, Republicans have twice in the modern era won the White House despite losing the popular vote.
The geographic divide has also had a real impact on policy and politics. The needs of cities and farm towns are often perceived as being in conflict — a tug of war between Republican and Democratic voters over resources. Until recently, scant racial diversity in the suburbs had allowed Republican politicians to cater to the concerns of white voters — and prey on their biases.
The geographic split also has exacerbated the tensions on display during the pandemic. Dense, Democratic areas were hit first by the coronavirus, allowing Trump to initially describe the disease as an urban problem and attack Democratic leaders for mishandling the response. Similarly, civil rights protests have been largest and most contentious in cities, and Trump has blamed their Democratic mayors.
Jonathan Rodden, a Stanford University political scientist and author of the 2019 book “Why Cities Lose,” said this political divide on density has eroded the shared responsibility among elected leaders. Instead, they think of themselves as representing different voter groups and that gives them less incentive to work together.
“Municipal officials can blame state and federal officials, who in turn blame lower-level officials,” Rodden said.
But he also believes the geographic divides can focus voters on local issues, where they’re more likely to have an impact, and lead to more local activism.
After the Arizona teacher strike in 2018, Democrats organized with the goal of increasing pay and reducing class sizes — issues with real impact on suburban families. A study by the Morrison Institute at Arizona State University had found teachers earned higher salaries in 2001 than in 2016 after adjusting for inflation. The effort galvanized local Democrats to elect Kathy Hoffman as state superintendent of public instruction, ending a 24year Republican grip on the office.