As the California mail-in vote trickles in, it’s looking more and more like Dems killed in suburban LA. But the most shocking suburban wins were near Oklahoma City (Kendra Horn) and Atlanta (Lucy McBath). The swing towards Democrats in suburban Atlanta over the past six years is really quite remarkable and similar things could start to happen all over the country, especially in the south.
The South won't start to vote for Democrats because of nonwhite/Hispanic voting. It will start to vote for Democrats if the Southern suburbs start to vote like Northern suburbs. https://t.co/bgBdDZn4sG
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) November 8, 2018
Look, I don’t like the idea of a suburban strategy. I don’t like suburbs — I grew up in the country and as an adult I feel most at home in Manhattan. There aren’t many good songs about the suburbs, maybe a few by the Modern Lovers but that’s about it. And the real purpose of the Democratic party is to protect workers, not middle-managers. But one thing I’ve learned in politics is that sometimes you’ve got to declare victory. That’s tough for liberals, I know. It’s becoming more and more clear that Tuesday night was a victory. Thirty-five plus in the House and we are pretty likely to end up only losing two in the Senate, which isn’t bad given the map.
Pundits want Dems to win back the guys who hang out at the bar next to the abandoned steel mill that only serves Bud. But maybe that’s not what the future is about at all.
Update. Are people not understanding that the point here is that the suburbs ARE where Democrats will gain?
rikyrah
Tuesday was nothing but a victory. And anyone who says otherwise needs to be slapped.
And, I say this with a broken heart.
JPL
I was shocked by the results, because it wasn’t that long ago that you could even get a democrat to run in the suburbs. The only reason I knew about Tom Price’s wife Betty losing was because a friend texted early Wednesday morning. Her statehouse seat was supposedly secure. This only bodes well for future elections because dems will challenge in GA.
rikyrah
I’m going to say this again…
Beto O’Rouke might not have won…
But, his run will change lives of people he will never meet.
The change in the judiciary in the largest county in Texas….
That will affect thousands upon thousands of people…
Thank you, Beto.
Marmot
People in the burbs are also a lot more worldly than resentful rural voters. From my experience, they’re a lot more likely to have demographically mixed friends too.
I should write a song.
Geoboy
@rikyrah: Amen
CarolDuhart2
You may have missed it, but the suburbs are also browning and becoming more diverse in general.
My family used to live in what was called the inner city, but over the decades all of us have moved further out, some to the inner suburbs, one even further. We are more owners than renters now. Some immigrants, especially the doctors and lawyers, already own houses in the suburbs.
Several of the old apartment buildings I used to see full in the 1960’s are now either being gentrified or empty, as the tenants have, despite some suburban red-lining, bought houses. And there’s a phenomenon rarely mentioned: the increasing number of black people who have at least reached the lower levels of the middle class and can now buy houses in the suburbs.
glory b
I read somewhere (at work so I don’t have time right now to look it up) that the burbs are becoming more diverse, and that almost as many African Americans live in suburbs as within city limits.
Platonailedit
@rikyrah: Dems have been accused, and rightly so, of not grooming future leaders. This cycle has thrown up some good young leaders like Beto. Time for the ‘establishment’ to bring the next generation aboard.
chopper
the sprawl II is a good one.
glory b
@CarolDuhart2: What Carol said.
Elizabelle
Wait, what? Aren’t their interests in great parts similar? Tell me more, Doug.
Abigail would not have won without the Liberal Women of Chesterfield County. Who live in — you guessed it — the suburbs. Do not diss the suburbs. It’s where you find tons of voters. Tons. Do not cede them to the GOP, which does not represent their issues as well as Democrats do.
Ian Harper
From this Tennessean’s vantage point, it does look like a national victory, and yet still status quo slightly north of Chattanooga. When a woman like Marsha Blackburn demolishes a popular former governer, a businessman and centrist Democrat as soundly as she did, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for change in my lifetime.
Elizabelle
@glory b: You read right, glory b. Quite diverse.
It’s not Levittown out there anymore.
ETA: Carol got there first. Doug should check those suburbs out!
CarolDuhart2
The middle management tiers are becoming more diverse on all levels, as companies realize that a diverse management corps looks good and makes outreach to customers, especially international customers and an increasingly diverse national customer base better. And even the working class who works in the traditional blue-collar jobs are increasingly diverse (black, brown, and other).
glory b
@Platonailedit: Was anyone pushing them away?
Platonailedit
Whut?
cain
Pundits are obsessed about winning over “Real America”. These pundits have no clue about that because all they do is hang out at dinner parties/cocktails in D.C. Like they know what the fuck that means. It’s not like they have any idea what “Real America” struggles are – either at blue collar worker level or the middle manager/surburbia level. We definitely need to continue to talk about healthcare and worker protections. Don’t listen to out of touch pundits, politics need to be as local as possible.
MattF
I’ve lived in suburbs just outside of major cities all my life– currently I’m just north of DC. And there’s been a big change here since I moved in 30 years ago. Thirty years ago, the County Executive and the Congressional rep were Republicans– moderate Republicans, yes, but that’s an extinct species. The last Republican Representative (Connie Morella) is a very nice person who just got a library named after her. Now elected officials are rather lefty Democrats who the WaPo opposes to no avail. Union-supporting lefty Democrats who have won with 65% of the vote. The number of elected Republicans in County government is zero.
And this has been true for a while.
CliosFanboy
that sounds more city than suburb to me, from the city edges where industry was concentrated surrounded by small homes and duplexes for the blue color workers..
cain
@rikyrah:
This. We have not seen the last of Beto. He’ll either run again in two years.. but in the meanwhile he’ll likely either work with the DNC to up his national profile, or he’ll work locally and help secure seats in Texas for next time and for his next run for Senator. Go Beto!
rp
Arcade Fire has a great album called “The Suburbs.”
NickM
@CarolDuhart2: This is exactly right. Suburbs are arguably more diverse than gentrifying cities nowadays. Besides which, not to get all Marxist, but when the petty bourgeouise start seeing that their interests and those of working people are aligned — watch out. :)
Thaddeu
Wow. That constant 27% crazification factor in the electorate is this?
JMG
The Mothers of Invention were all about the suburbs.
Aziz, light!
Jebus, Doug, phrasing! “Dems killed in suburban LA” = victims in Thousand Oaks. Please choose a different metaphor.
L85NJGT
Hating on the ‘burbs is so eighties. There are plenty of workers in the suburbs. Many have been driven out by hipster dip shits making the city neighborhoods unaffordable. Then the hipsters reverse commute out to their management jobs.
M31
LOL a friend who lived in a upper-middle class suburb in MD described her diverse cul-de-sac as follows: “We’ve got a black lawyer, a hispanic lawyer, AND an asian lawyer!”
Roger Moore
@CarolDuhart2:
This is a huge thing here in Southern California. There are too many non-whites for them to fit in the inner city anymore, so they’ve been moving into the suburbs. Now an important fact of living here is which suburbs have which ethnic group- if only so you know where the authentic restaurants are. So I know there are Cambodian people in Long Beach, Vietnamese in Garden Grove, Indians in Cerritos, etc. The San Gabriel Valley is known as the first suburban Chinatown. Orange County- Nixon’s and Reagan’s old stronghold- has turned purple, with signs of actual blueness, largely because it’s no longer predominantly white.
Uncle Cholmondeley
In Minnesota there is a beloved band called the Suburbs.
EdTheRed
The highway is your girlfriend as you go by quick
Suburban trees, suburban speed
And it smells like heaven
(Nah, not even the Modern Lovers can make me miss the suburbs…but I *do* love that song.)
Kent
Not as surprising as you might think. I dont know about Atlanta but Oklahoma City is a rapidly fast growing city with thousands of white collar types moving in from other states every year. Hispanic and Asian populations are doubling and tripling every decade or faster. The Texas suburbs are the same. It’s not right wing rural Texans moving to the burbs, it’s people moving in from CA and elsewhere. I used to live in Waco a few years ago and more than half my neighbors were from out of state or out of the country. Rural OK will remain blood red, but the bigger cities are changing like everyplace else. People aren’t changing their minds. The people themselves are changing
Roger Moore
Free Fallin.
tobie
Can we get real for a moment?
How many factory workers are there in the US? Is that what labor will look like in the future? There are more baristas, more in-home healthcare workers than assembly line workers in the US at this point. Yes, we should do everything to protect labor and to ensure that they have a decent life and the skills to get decent-paying jobs because that’s the right thing to do. But labor in the 21st century is not going to look anything like labor in the 20th century. Being a laborer doesn’t necessarily mean wearing a hard hat any longer.
Doug!: I think this is the point you’re making. I’m railing at the pundits here.
sherparick
@rikyrah: It is possible that he has reinvented and revived the Democratic Party in Texas. He ran a great campaign. In 2006, a Democratic wave election, Kay Baily Hutchinson won this seat with 61% of the vote and the Democrat only got 39%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_in_Texas,_2006
In 2008, in another Democratic wave election John Coryn beat Rich Noriega 55% to 43%. https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2008/results/states/texas.html#senate
So we come to 2018 and O’Rourke gets 48.3% of the vote, just 2.55 behind Cruz, who got only 50.9% of the vote. You can look at gains in the counties around Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and San Antonio.
A guy named Lincoln lost a senate race against a highly favored incumbent and won the Presidency in the next election.
JR
Southern California Punk ca. 1980-1990?
Dorothy A. Winsor
@M31: That’s what my neighborhood in IA was like only it was engineers and doctors.
sherparick
@Roger Moore: Yep. See: https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2008/results/states/texas.html#senate
Ladyraxterinok
In the late 80s my friend called our smallish IA town a’suburb to nowhere’!!
The Moar You Know
I’ve spent my entire life in the suburbs save for six years living in SF. Relative merits aside, you’d be insane to write off the burbs. At least here in CA, they’re far more racially diverse than the city cores and have moved from being reliable Republican votes to being up for grabs or, increasingly, straight-up Dem, as the GOP keeps enacting policies that directly hurt the interests of suburban voters to help their shrinking base of white rural voters.
Plus, man, the numbers. You don’t say no to an electorate that large. You don’t leave that sitting on the table. As more people move to urban/suburban areas – and I think that’s about 80% of the population at this point – you don’t leave those people out to be snapped up by the GOP. We’re already winning in most suburban areas, at least here. Won’t take much to make that the case nationally.
guachi
To expand on the tweet about suburbs being important, here’s the breakdown from exit polling of where votes for Democrats came from in the House races. Numbers are percentage of Democratic votes coming from that group.
White women: 34.3%
White men: 25.6%
Black women: 10.3%
Black men: 8.2%
Hispanic women: 8.2%
Hispanic men: 6.0%
Asian women: 2.3%
Asian men: 2.0%
In other words, there were 40% more white men voting for Democrats than blacks of both genders combined. So even if Democrats do poorly overall with white men and only broke even with white women white voters are critical in suburbs and northern states like Montana (D hold in Senate), Minnesota (net zero in House, but a Democratic state), Maine (whitest state in America but +1 House and flip the Gov race).
Neldob
Back in the day Jim Kweskin (?) did a cool song of burbs.
Barbara
What unites suburban voters is a desire to fund education and not feel like you have to send your kids to private school, which feels to many people like a huge tax. Lots of people (including my best friend) leave Manhattan for New Jersey and Westchester for this reason alone.
Rural locations are even more sprawling and car dependent than suburban locations, they just usually have a lot less traffic because, duh, no one lives there. Many people living in suburbs are hardly middle managers because, duh, everyone lives in suburbs, and by everyone I mean every kind of person doing every kind of occupation. Some are wealthier and closer to transit and urban amenities, like the one I live in, and others are closer to the kinds of rural places that you extol. Winning in the suburbs means winning in America. Your post is making that fabled New Yorker cover seem like it was an accurate depiction of the Manhattan mindset.
Chyron HR
Pet Shop Boys – Suburbia
Neldob
Also blue collars are found in the burbs.
The Moar You Know
@tobie: My uncle built the BMW transmission plant in South Carolina, the one that Trump is probably going to put out of business. I’ve been there. The lack of people involved in the process is startling. Those jobs are going away. Forever.
He told me about the Coca Cola plant he’d just toured. Said the only people there were the folks loading the machines with raw sheet metal, ink, cardboard, Coke base, and loading the trucks. For the entire bottling plant, that was ten people.
Again, those jobs are going away. Forever.
kindness
Yow! Doug throws us suburbans under the bus because……..he’s uncomfortable. Now I get it that you were trying to make a point Doug. I’m only pointing out that your point requires treating suburbans as unhealthy and odd.
You know the surrounding suburbs of cities often times have a higher population than the cities they surround, right?
Barbara
@Neldob: Yeah, like the burb I grew up in outside of Pittsburgh, in the 60s and 70s. Geez, Doug J., you are really making me wonder at your base of knowledge. Blue collar workers are like the group who are least likely to still be found within city limits and that’s been true FOR AT LEAST TWO GENERATIONS.
CarolDuhart2
@CliosFanboy: Also that place-the abandoned steel mill has become condos with the bar being a craft beer place with 20 different kinds of beer and a diner on the first floor. And by the way, its starting to happen to old retail places like malls too, and I’ve seen old downtown office buildings become housing as well. One of the barely noticed drivers of suburbanization and gentrification is technology. When you no longer need acres of typewriters and their desks, tons of file cabinets and bookshelves, the reason to lease expensive downtown real estate is less-but with some of them having beautiful architecture, nobody wants to waste it.
And the old steel mill moved and now needs fewer people to run it.
Eural Joiner
True Beto story – my son and his friends (all +/- 18 by a few years) are rabid Beto fans and think he’s the greatest thing ever. They couldn’t vote this time around, but his mere presence has fired them up for future elections. And we’re from SC, not Texas!
Ladyraxterinok
@Kent: Dem House candidate won in Tulsa OK but lost in the district as a whole.
Roger Moore
@cain:
“Real America” has always been a racist dog whistle, and any pundit or politician who uses it as a reason for caring more about some voters than others should be treated with skepticism at best.
jonas
@Ian Harper: Yeah, Tennessee, like Missouri and Arkansas, was a state that occasionally elected sane people — even Democrats! — to Congress and statewide office, but now appears to be firmly in the grip of the craziest-ass MAGAts in the whole country. What happened?
Another Scott
Nice trolling!
https://youtu.be/xMveyhTJmoA (4:42)
:-)
Cheers,
Scott.
kindness
@jonas: What happened? My parents generation of Republicans who were social liberals and fiscal conservatives died off. Now Republicans have the old, cranky, selfish Fox News viewers who seem to like peeing their pants all the time.
cain
@Roger Moore:
You and I know that, but Im hoping Democratic leadership knows that. I hope they will also listen to the folks that won this election because they know what’s happening on the ground.
BTW, I’m fairly sure that younger millenials and gen Zs are moving out of suburbs and into core downtown areas. My experience in Denver and Portland is that those are hot real estate. People like not owning a car, being able to use Lyft (fuck uber) to get around and enjoy the diversity in the downtown area. I myself like being in neighborhoods that have higher density with good selection of places to eat/drink within walking distance and I’m a Gen Xer. I can imagine that other Gen Xers feel the same too.
Sadly, I’m moving back to the suburbs when I return to Portland because I have to stay in a house and you can only go to places by car. I really miss the fact that I acn walk anywhere in PDX and in Downtown Denver.
burnspbesq
The guys who hang out at that bar are the core of Trump’s support. They’re gone. Forget them.
The future of the Democratic Party are the folks who drink Two-Buck Chuck from plastic glasses, worry about whether they have spare cash to stick in the 529 account this month, and don’t go into the city as often as they used to because lots of reasons. They still, despite all the evidence to the contrary, believe in the American Dream.
A great recent song about the suburbs.
https://youtu.be/nu4dupoC7EE
cain
@jonas:
They may need to be out in the weeds like Kansas and hit rock bottom before they can realize that Republican rules suck. In these states unlike federal, Democrats are not around to bail them out. Places like Kansas after all their tax cuts have not produced anything of worth and have only accelerated the brain drain out. Ultimately, even for Republicans there isn’t any more money to grift since after you’ve given the farm away, what leverage do you have to get more money?
Even worse, now all your farmers are on the federal dole. Nobody is actually doing a job and making money and that’s under Republican rule. Something Democrats in those states need to point out. They’ve literally turned places like Kansas into a socialist state.
tobie
@The Moar You Know: Your uncle’s experiences are interesting. He should post here! I feel like the shape of labor is a global problem that no one is talking about in North America or Europe. At least not on the political stage. Yes, there are those who write books talking about how workers are becoming irrelevant in a strange tone, almost intoxicated with technology. But I haven’t seen it front and center of the platform of any major political party in the US or Germany, the two countries I track. Why are we so vested in the image of the guy in a hard hat? I hate to say it but that’s what turned me off to Randy Bryce.
NonyNony
Jeebus.
Suburbs, as terrible as they are, are not full of “middle managers”. Do middle managers live in suburbs? yes. Do teachers, retail workers, skilled tradesmen, doctors, lawyers, college professors, office drones, magicians that hire themselves out to birthday parties and plenty of other folks also live in suburbs? yes. Are the suburbs becoming more diverse all of the time? Hell yes.
The reason why Democratic votes are coming from the suburbs is because Democratic voters are moving to the suburbs. The price of housing in major urban centers is skyrocketing as gentrification and other urban renewal projects move forward. That pushes people out of the city and into – you guessed it – the suburbs.
Yes suburbs have been predominantly white middle-to-upper-middle class people for the last 50 years. Mostly because the automobile industry explosion and desegregation happened nearly at the same time (without cheap automobiles you don’t get white flight, without white flight you don’t get the suburbs we have today). But that’s changing rapidly and not realizing that the suburbs are where the gettable votes for a coalition are now and will be for the near future is just shooting yourself in the foot.
Fair Economist
@cain:
They may want to but most won’t because there’s not enough places. Something like 40% of the populations wants to live in walkable areas (which basically means downtowns in modern America) but only about 10% of our housing is there. The other thirty percent or so may want to live downtown, but they will have to live elsewhere.
burnspbesq
@sherparick:
When you drill into the Texas data, you can find plenty of reason for hope and incentives to keep working. The Democratic future in Texas is in counties like Fort Bend outside Houston and Williamson (the northern suburbs of Austin).
Platonailedit
doug1 or dougj or whatever name you fancy to ‘troll’ us. Your hot takes on politics are dumb. Just stick to your strong suits – fundraising and obscure song titles for your thread titles.
japa21
Just wanted to say, this may well be the dumbest doug! post ever. That is all.
gvg
Inner cities are tiny comparitively. I have always lived in “suburbs” because that is what was there. Downtown and city were also mostly offices. Only later after I was grown, did they start developing and rehabbing old housing. Frankly, most people around here don’t care for that lifestyle. blue collar and middle management just live in slightly different suburbs, though it’s not clearly divided. And I have never had an option of doing without a car or walking everywhere.
Now personally I am land greedy because I garden, but lots of people want just a smidge of lawn cared for by someone else. Most don’t want condos though, only a few. Dense housing still tends to lose value around here. I really don’t recommend condos or townhouses because they always seem to have more cycles where they boom and bust. Not a good investment which our homes need to be. They wouldn’t loose value if more people consistently valued them.
I wasn’t aware democrats were supposedly ignoring suburbs. they never have here, because there isn’t much else. Florida’s huge population growth has nearly all been suburbs.
dww44
FWIW, as a lifelong resident of the state but not of Atlanta, I think this switch to Dems is the result of (1) the increasing diversity of the Atlanta metro suburbs (they are really diverse now) and (2) the realization on the part of many citizens that Trump is a threat to our democracy and the other party is not gonna do anything to check him! This may not be a permanent trend;instead it is one we have to build on.
The Moar You Know
@tobie: He could, he’s much smarter than he thinks he is and is a fairly vehement Dem, but he’s old school (literally, 70 yrs) and a bit combative online so I think I won’t extend that invitation. He’d piss off a lot of people here. He pisses me off at least once a month. It’s who he is. I wouldn’t change him for anything :)
tobie
@The Moar You Know: Hip hip hooray for cantankerous aunts and uncles! You should interview your uncle for a family archive. He sounds like one of a kind.
RobertB
Does Rush’s “Subdivisions” count? It’s the last song they did that I really like.
FlipYrWhig
I believe the Democratic Party should stand for the people who vote for the Democratic Party. If swathes of “workers” cease to do that, out of spite or stupidity or whatever other reason (migrant caravans giving us all ebola?), how’s about they go crying to the party they’re already voting for to get representation and help? That’s their shitpile and they can rub their own noses in it.
dr. luba
The small lily white suburb I grew up in (we had one black family and one Jewish family in my high school) has become not only the largest city in Oakland county, but quite diverse. The teabaggers try to cling to dominance, but there are huge numbers of POC now: Asian, middle eastern, AA. A group has been trying to build a mosque there for years, only to run into problems with the planning commission and “activist pastors.”
I am glad I moved away 35 years ago, but am happy to see the demographics incrementally changing.
Kent
Bud? That’s college boy beer. Real steelworkers drink Iron City
Kent
The suburb I lived at in Texas until 2 years ago was probably typical of this trend. Newer upscale part of Waco. Probably 5 Priuses within a block radius and not a monster truck in sight. My most immediate neighbors were: Korean-American family on an investor visa, Indian doctor family, Indian engineer family working at SpaceX, Chinese-American sofware engineer family, Corporate exec family from Argentina, banker originally from Illinois, insurance exec from another part of Texas, several black families that were mostly retired military from elsewhere on 2nd careers in white collar jobs, non-profit exec and teacher from Houston area, and doctor from another part of Texas. Not one of my neighbors was born and raised in the area, and most were not orginally Texans.
If you travel through any of the fast growing suburbs in Texas it is pretty much the same story. The old white people in the small towns are dying out and these are who are moving in. In addition, of course, enormous numbers of Hispanics.
Doug!
@Elizabelle:
Perhaps I shouldn’t have said “middle-manager” but traditionally at least in the northeast, Republicans are management, Democrats are workers, traditionally. Managers can hire and fire. Workers need the government to protect them from management.
Doug!
@burnspbesq:
Yup
ColBear
Awful post Doug! If this were a video game I’d tell you to uninstall. Broadly stereotyping areas of the country and people is the sort of thing the “President” does. Glad to see you and him are in the same boat! And BTW, here is one of those suburban Democrats you’re talking about. She grew up in Naperville, Illinois…the most suburbiest place in the world. I guess you don’t want her in the party?
Michael Cain
“Look, I don’t like the idea of a suburban strategy.”
Speaking as a registered Democrat in a western state, this reflects my biggest worry about the national Dem party. The West is arguably the future of the party, and it’s all about the suburbs. The 30-year ongoing bluing of the West has happened by winning suburbs. California is blue because the suburbs switched. Colorado has gotten bluer because the suburbs switched. Sinema is competitive in the Arizona Senate race — and seems to me likely to win it — because the Phoenix suburbs switched. There are two views in the party — one that’s focused on lack of growth, one that’s focused on handling extreme growth, primarily in the suburbs — and I don’t know how to reconcile them. After the 2020 census the NE and Rust Belt states will lose six or seven House seats; the West will gain three or four.
In the 2010 census the Census Bureau finally gave us data based on urbanized areas rather than counties, and it turned a bunch of the conventional wisdom on its head. Using urbanized area as the denominator, CA is (narrowly) the densest state; LA is the densest metropolitan area; and western suburbs are twice as dense as those in other parts of the country, approaching (on average) the urban core densities of the Midwest and South.
schrodingers_cat
I have known a fair number of working class white guys in New England and NY, and was friends with some of them too, all of them were Ds. When I worked with them they were helpful to a fault.
I have come across more racists in the polite to your face, I eat Indian food so I can’t be a racist, middle class R voting peeps than the much maligned WWC folks. This is anecdata and this may be different in other parts of the country.
Bighorn Ordovician Dolomite
Just to highlight one more overlooked aspect of the ‘burbs, there are a LOT of trailer parks sprinkled into the suburbs—it ain’t all middle managers out there. I grew up in one, and they are definitely a factor in growing diversity, if dems can make a consistent connection there that will certainly have an impact.
Doug!
@schrodingers_cat:
I agree with you.
There’s lots of things to dislike about upscale suburban people, but…in the end, they are trending Democrat while WWC are not.
Doug!
@Michael Cain:
Yes.
waratah
I am late posting here, I had a doctor appointment. I just want to say to Doug a reporter said about the suburban women helping Beto that those women know how to fund raise.
FlipYrWhig
@Michael Cain: That’s the story of the “bluing” of Virginia too.
tam1MI
@rikyrah: Hey, I hear that Keith Ellison’s spot at the DNC is open. Why not give it to Beto?
cain
@Fair Economist:
In Portland Metro area, we are encouraging denser housing and not expanding roads at all. It’s either public transport or build denser housing. I approve. I think also mixing incomes as well so it isn’t all rich and poor areas. But sustainable growth is where it is at. Frankly this is great for small businesses like restaurant as the denser population means more customers. If they have to drive to your place to eat it is a losing proposition.
Republicans have no plan for this. They still think it’s the 80s and still want to do car driven economies but that’s not what young people want.
cain
@RobertB:
“In the high school halls, in the shopping malls, conform or be cast out! [subdivisions!]”
Subdivisions I think is more about separation than actual subdivisions. IMHO.
cain
@Michael Cain:
I’m not sure which West you’re talking about. Because that isn’t true in the Northwest.
Doug!
@waratah:
I bet they do. Suburban women are going to make great Democrats.
Michael Cain
@cain:
Which part are you saying isn’t true?
schrodingers_cat
@Doug!: In my anecdotal example, the WWC men were Democrats and the wealthy to upper middle class educated folk were Rs or R leaning independents. In the northeastern states where unions are relatively strong WWC men are Ds.
low-tech cyclist
Hey Doug, it looks like there’s another postcard mobilization, this time for Mike Espy in the Mississippi runoff. It’s a longshot, of course, but if this is on the level, it’s worth a few minutes to write some cards.
https://twitter.com/eorlins/status/1060658804717731842