This amazingly idealized story was told to families some time after the end of World War II. It sold the suburbs. To white families of course. I collected this and hundreds of other films to help me create my 6 part PBS television series Making Sense Of The Sixties. In it, I make the case that it was this kind of fantasy told men and women and children in the 1950s that created the rebellious explosions of the 1960s.
David Hoffman
Trump and the suburbs: is he out of tune with
America's increasingly diverse voters?
Trump is promoting a vision of
America’s suburbs that no longer exists
Mounting suburban backlash to Trump’s handling of the
pandemic is threatening his re-election prospects.
Suburbs are becoming more progressive, valuing
diversity, and Trump is promoting a caricature of what they really are,
strategists say
Lauren Gambino
@laurenegambino
Published onSun 9 Aug 2020 09.35 BST
Speaking on a hot, windy afternoon during a
visit to the fracking fields of west Texas last month, Donald Trump conjured an
ominous vision of suburban America under siege: terrorized by rising crime and
threatened by the development of low-income housing.
“It’s been
hell for suburbia,” Trump declared, touting his decision to rescind an
Obama-era fair-housing rule to combat racial segregation in the suburbs, part
of his promise to preserve what he called the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream”. To
the scattered crowd in attendance, he added: “So, enjoy your life, ladies and
gentlemen. Enjoy your life.”
Nearly 500 miles east, in the expanse of metropolitan Houston, Democrat Sri Preston Kulkarni is running to represent a suburban congressional district that is worlds apart from the one that exists in Trump’s imagination.
Texas’ 22nd congressional district, which is
almost the size of Rhode Island and nearly as populous, is so diverse that his
campaign is distributing literature in 21 languages. Protests against police
brutality and racial discrimination spread throughout the region after the
death of George Floyd, a black man who died under the knee of a white
Minneapolis police. And Floyd, a native of Houston, was laid to rest in the
district.
“This is new Texas,” said Kulkarni, a former
diplomat who grew up in Houston. “It’s diverse, it’s educated, it’s dynamic.”
And it’s not only Texas. From Atlanta to
Phoenix, this pattern is part of a longterm political realignment of the
suburbs that has been dramatically accelerated by Trump’s presidency.
Once a cornerstone of the Republican
coalition, these densely populated metropolitan suburbs are turning
increasingly Democratic. At the same time, the more sparsely populated exurban
areas have become even more deeply Republican, countering, for now, Democrats’
gains elsewhere in the suburbs. The fight then is increasingly for the voters
in the middle, the suburbanites lodged between liberal and conservative
America.
Until now, Trump has appeared uninterested in persuading these swing voters back, alienating them further with the inflammatory rhetoric and hardline views on race and cultural heritage that excite his base.
But their
mounting backlash to Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his
attempts to stoke racial grievance have imperiled the president’s re-election
prospects and put his party at risk of being shut out of power in Congress.
Trump is promoting
a vision of America’s suburbs that no longer exists
In recent weeks, Trump has sought to appeal,
with little subtlety, to suburban voters. In one tweet, he vowed to protect
“the Suburban Housewives of America” from the threat posed by his Democratic
presidential rival Joe Biden.
In a play to the perceived racist fears of
white suburban voters, he wrote: “I am happy to inform all of the people living
their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or
financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood.”
Demographers and political strategists say
Trump is promoting a vision of America’s suburbs with aproned housewives, leafy
cul-de-sacs and picket fences that no longer exists.
“He’s talking about an America that’s at least 40 or 50 years old,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “The suburbs of today are really a microcosm of America.”
A decades-long rise in the number of people of
color, immigrants and college graduates, have transformed the sleepy bedroom
communities of yesteryear into sprawling amalgams of America’s diversity. There
are also far fewer housewives and the overall rates of violent crime have
declined significantly.
In response to the recent upheaval, Trump
adopted a strategy used by Richard Nixon as a presidential candidate during the
turmoil of 1968, vowing to be a “president of law-and-order” and protect
suburbanites from outside threats.
But suburban voters say they strongly
disapprove of his handling of the protests, according to a New York Times/Siena
College survey. An even larger share say they have a favorable view of the
Black Lives Matter movement, which Trump denounced as a “symbol of hate”.
Overall, recent polling shows suburban voters
backing Biden by historic margins.
Suburban women
are not going to be fooled by Donald Trump’s antiquated notion of what they
should care about.
Shannon Watts
A recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey found that just 35% of suburbanites would vote for Trump, almost the same proportion – 33% – who said they approved of his job as president. That contrasts with 60% of suburban voters who said they would support Biden.
The disaffection is particularly pronounced
among suburban women: 66% said they would support Biden, compared to 48% of
suburban men.
“The Trump administration has in many ways
radicalized women and moms,” said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action,
part of Everytown for Gun Safety, which is spending heavily on political races
in diversifying Sun Belt states.
Watts was a stay-at-home mother of five when
she started the group in 2012, after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting.
She realized then that she had been “living in a bubble” as a white suburban
woman, and was awakened to the trauma of gun violence that disproportionately
impacts communities of color every day.
Watts believes white suburban women across the
country, for whom gun reform is increasingly a voting priority, are having a
similar realization in response to the Black Lives Matter protests. In
November, she hopes they will join Black and Hispanic women in removing Trump
from office.
“Suburban women are diverse and decisive,” she
said, “and they are not going to be fooled by Donald Trump’s antiquated notion
of what they should care about.”
Suburban women as a force in American politics is not new. In the 1990s, campaigns targeted the “soccer moms.” After the September 11 terrorist attacks, they became the “security moms”. And in 2008, Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee, rebranded them “hockey moms.”.
In 2018, suburban women – both as candidates
and voters – helped Democrats regain control of the House by flipping long-held
Republican districts on the outskirts of Atlanta, Dallas and Houston. In a
rout, Democrats swept all seven districts of Orange county, once a fortress of
suburban conservatism known as Reagan country.
Now in 2020 – less than three months before
the November election – Democrats are increasingly confident about their
strength in the suburbs, as the Biden campaign expands its footprint in states
like North Carolina, Arizona and Texas.
Trump won suburban voters by four percentage
points in 2016, according to exit polls. Some strategists believe he has an
opportunity to do so again this year, if swing voters perceive Democrats as
moving too far left.
“Suburbanites have not moved wholesale to the
Democratic party,” said Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman from
Virginia.
The affluent suburban district he once
represented is now solidly Democratic, part of a political metamorphosis that
has all but wiped from power the Republicans who once dominated this southern
state.
The politics are only beginning to catch up
with the new demographic realities’
Though the suburbs have changed, Davis said
they remain an aspirational destination for upwardly-mobile families and young people,
a place where residents expect low crime, fewer taxes, better schools and
stable property values. As such, he said they have a distinct political
identity as homeowners and parents that still aligns more closely with the
Republican agenda.
“Trump is speaking to suburbians who don’t
want the city moving out to where they are,” Davis said. “That’s why they live
there. It’s a statement. It’s not a racial statement – but it is a values
statement.”
Republicans continue to thrive in suburban
areas surrounding smaller cities like Indianapolis and Jacksonville, Florida,
which tend to be less diverse and more conservative.
Voters in these communities overwhelmingly
backed Trump in 2016 and provided decisive margins in states such as Wisconsin,
Pennsylvania and Michigan, where fewer than 80,000 votes sealed his victory.
Democrats do not need to win these voters, but
they cannot afford to ignore them either, said Lanae Erickson, the senior
vice-president at the center-left thinktank Third Way.
In a new analysis of suburban counties in six battleground states, shared exclusively with the Guardian, Third Way identified 30 smaller suburban counties where Democrats have an opportunity to breach these Republican firewalls.
Using voter file data, the analysis projects,
that for example, that in Pennsylvania Democrats will grow their vote total in
the state’s most populous suburban county, Montgomery Ccounty, by 28,792 votes.
By contrast, Democrats are expected to gain a total of 145,511 votes across the
state’s nine smaller suburban counties, due in part to an influx of Latinos.
In a razor-thin election like 2016, when
Hillary Clinton lost the state by just 44,000 votes, these counties could be
decisive.
Suburbanization will continue to reshape
American politics long after 2020.
“The politics are only beginning to catch up
with the new demographic realities”, said Stephen Klineberg, a professor of
sociology at Rice University and the author of Prophetic City: Houston on the
Cusp of a Changing America. “By 2050, all of America will look like Houston
looks today.”
In that sense, the open race for Texas’ 22nd
congressional district is like peering into the future, Klineberg said.
There in the sprawl of Houston’s suburbs,
Kulkarni, whose father is from India and whose mother is a descendent of the
city’s namesake, Sam Houston, is running against Troy Nehls, the Republican
sheriff of Fort Bend county, which covers much of the district and is almost
equally split among Asian American, African American, Hispanic and white
voters.
During the Republican primary, which tested
the candidates’ fealty to Trump, Nehls denounced an early effort by local
officials to mandate mask-wearing and mimicked the president’s rhetoric on the
protests. But on social media, he has vowed to “build bridges” between the
minority communities in his district and law enforcement.
As Houston grapples with the devastation
caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis, as well as
the aftershocks of the racial justice protests, Kulkarni says voters of all
political stripes are ready to move beyond a “politics of division”.
“They are tired of the attacks on science and
healthcare,” Kulkarni said. “They like the fact that we live in a diverse area.
And I think there’s actually more of a consensus now than I’ve ever seen before
that diversity is our strength, not our weakness.”
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