The Democratic Party’s Suburban Shift Can Empower Progressives
By Sean McElwee and Colin McAuliffe
In 2006, the Democratic strategy to win a House majority focused on winning over rural white voters with Blue Dog candidates — anti-choice, pro-gun deficit hawks. Helmed by Rahm Emanuel, the party sought a specific candidate, very often male, almost always white and with few exceptions, more conservative than most Democrats in the caucus. The strategy was successful in winning back the House, but it constrained Democratic ambition after Obama’s election, with these more centrist Democrats opposing key parts of his agenda to address healthcare and climate change.
Since Trump’s election in 2016, there has been a shift towards a new battleground: suburban districts, particularly in the west and southwest, souring on Trump. This allowed for more mainstream Democratic candidates: across the suburbs, Democrats ran no anti-choice candidates and no pro-NRA candidates. Several candidates who won supported Medicare for All and the rest supported the public option (a dramatic shift from the ‘06 swing district Democrats). In addition, the cookie cutter white male businessmen were replaced by a diverse slate of candidates with a broad range of career backgrounds before entering public service. However, many have still worried that suburban voters will halt the party’s move in a more leftward direction, particularly on issues of economics.
In the New York Times, Lily Geismer and Matthew D. Lassiter argued that, “Democrats cannot cater to white swing voters in affluent suburbs and also promote policies that fundamentally challenge income inequality, exclusionary zoning, housing segregation, school inequality, police brutality and mass incarceration.” The natural question of course, assuming this is true, would be how else Democrats could put together a majority coalition. The authors say that Democrats should “embrace a broad economic platform promoted by progressives like Elizabeth Warren and Stacey Abrams.” However, when Abrams ran for Governor of Georgia, she found support in the very suburbs that Geismer and Lassiter decry.
The claim has been popular in other publications who have mistaken rural distaste for Clinton and attraction to Sanders' populist rhetorical style in the 2016 primary as blanket support for Sanders’s more progressive agenda. These writers have argued that Democratic victory in the suburbs will limit the progressive agenda (though they provide no alternative geographic base for a congressional majority). An analysis of the data reveals that suburbs are more ripe for progressive success. In the recent past, the Democratic Party had a congressional majority built in the rural districts across the country. The 111th Congress (2009-2011) is a key example of this. As the chart shows, the 116th Congress has a much different Democratic class in comparison, after the Republican Party was routed in the suburbs.
It is difficult to tease out exactly what “suburbs” means, but it is a powerful concept in politics. Even controlling for demographic characteristics like education, density predicts political attitudes. For this analysis, we rely primarily on the CityLab classification of density, though self-reported density (asking respondents whether they live in a suburb, city or rural area) generates the same result. Analyzing the CityLab characterizations, we see that the share of Democrats from rural and rural-suburban districts has plummeted, with the Democratic majority increasingly located in suburban and urban districts.
Despite being a very rural Democratic majority, the 111th is not remembered as a particularly progressive one. And to the extent that it was progressive, it was largely in spite of the rural members, not because of it. None of the Democrats in urban, urban-suburban or dense suburban districts opposed the stimulus in response to the 2008 global financial crisis. By contrast, eleven percent of Democrats in rural districts and 9 percent in mixed rural-suburban districts did. The signature healthcare reform from the Obama administration, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), was opposed by 40 percent of rural Democratic members and 24 percent of rural-suburban-mix Democratic members. Among Democrats not representing these districts, only four percent voted against the ACA. Analysts who argue that a suburban congressional majority is bad for progressive politics must grapple with the reality that a rural congressional majority would be a far bigger impediment to progressive change. A rural majority would not increase the chances of Medicare for All, nor would a more rural congressional delegation increase the odds of a Green New Deal if the 111th Congress is any indication. Nearly half of rural Democrats (46 percent) voted against the Waxman-Markey climate bill, as did 30 percent of those representing a rural-suburban mix. Among those not representing these rural districts, only 5 percent of Democrats voted against the bill. And would a rural Democratic majority be more likely to take on Wall Street? The 111th indicates it would be unlikely — 33 percent of rural Democrats and 12 percent of rural-suburban Democrats opposed Dodd-Frank, compared to four percent of Democrats representing other districts. Notably, for all of these data points, the percentage of Democrats opposed in non-rural districts is overwhelmingly from the sparsest suburban districts.
We can see a similar trend in the more recent 116th Congress (2019-2021), where density was strongly associated with membership in the Progressive Caucus, while the remaining “Blue Dog” centrist Democrats hail from very rural districts.
It could be the case that these rural representatives don’t reference the true economic preferences of their voters. Some analysts have argued in books like “What’s the Matter With Kansas” that rural whites have conservative views on issues like abortion but liberal views on economic issues.
To test this, we analyzed Medicaid expansion ballot initiatives, which allows us to isolate these voters’ preference on economic issues. Expanding Medicaid is a very popular expansion of the social safety net. If rural voters are going to be champions of a strong safety net and Medicare for All, taxing corporations to expand healthcare to poor Americans should certainly qualify. But we find that when Medicaid expansion was actually on the ballot, rural voters were the least supportive. In Idaho, 54 percent of rural voters and 63 percent of suburban voters support Medicaid expansion. In Maine, where rural New Englanders are quite often more receptive to progressive ideas than rural voters elsewhere, 56 percent of rural voters and 69 percent of suburban voters supported the initiative. And in Nebraska, where Medicaid expansion only narrowly passed, rural voters opposed the initiative. When Medicare for All was on the ballot in Colorado, it was strongly opposed across the state, but fared the worst in rural areas. In Florida, the $15 minimum wage ballot initiative had 49 percent support among rural voters, 59 percent support among suburban voters and 71 percent support among urban voters. That same year Colorado also had an initiative on the ballot which would have raised new taxes on high incomes to fund education, which was narrowly defeated but was opposed most strongly in rural areas. Similar studies have found that college education is predictive of support for Medicaid expansion.
While most commentators focused on the Presidential election, the Democratic establishment ended up supporting mostly quite progressive candidates in the affluent suburban districts we are so frequently warned about. In Texas’s 24th, with a median income of $75,000 and comprising the suburbs around Dallas, Democrats ran Afro-Latina progressive Candace Valenzuela. In the 21st, the candidate was progressive Wendy Davis, who became famous for her pro-choice protest. And indeed, when Democrats flipped seven upscale suburban California districts, three of the new members supported Medicare for All, including the progressive champion Katie Porter.
In 2018, 12 of the 43 flips came from dense districts and 16 came from sparse suburban districts, while only two rural districts and six rural-suburban districts flipped to Democrats (one rural and two rural-suburban districts moved toward Republicans, no more dense districts did). Progressive hero Katie Porter represents an urban-suburban mix, and other California flip districts with incumbents who support Medicare for All like Mike Levin and Josh Harder both represent dense suburban districts. Meanwhile progressives struggled in districts like Wisconsin’s 1st (sparse suburban) and New York’s 24th (rural-suburban mix). This cycle, progressives are looking for pick-ups in dense suburban districts like TX-24, NE-02 and TX-21.
To put a finer point on this, we merged the CityLab data to the Voter Study Group survey to explore individual attitudes on taxes, healthcare, race and inequality. We find that rural voters are far more conservative than voters living in denser areas on all of the issues, even the more populist economic issues that pundits have focused on. And Geismer and Lassiter’s argument that a suburban majority of Democrats cannot appeal to suburban voters while addressing economic and racial inequality is particularly weak — these suburban districts where Democrats are winning are more supportive of liberalized immigration laws, unionization and redistribution. In Data for Progress polling on the American Rescue Plan, we find 63 percent support among rural voters (31 percent opposed), 71 percent among suburban voters (24 percent opposed) and 78 percent among urban voters (18 percent opposed). The ARP is a $1.9 trillion package that would dramatically reduce childhood poverty and dramatically redistribute income towards working and middle income Americans. Similarly, we find that the PRO Act, labor rights legislation that would end right-to-work laws, has 55 percent support (30 percent opposed) among rural voters, 59 percent support (27 percent opposed) among suburban voters and 64 percent support (21 percent opposed) among urban voters.
The most progressive members of Congress tend to hail from districts that are both lower income and urban, but a fair number of progressives represent districts that are quite affluent. Several high income districts are represented by Democrats who are cosponsors of single payer healthcare legislation. By contrast, many low to middle income districts have a habit of sending Republicans to represent them. Specifically, Republicans who use their power not only to fiercely oppose even modest expansions to the role of the public sector in healthcare, but to actively vandalize the healthcare system at great cost to the health and financial security of countless Americans.
Healthcare, along with some other center left economic reforms, has the most rural appeal compared to anything else in the progressive agenda. Focusing on this can help Democrats peel off some rural voters at the margins, which can be crucial in elections where the rural vote has disproportionate weight, but formation of a durable progressive coalition that relies heavily on low socioeconomic status rural constituencies does not appear likely. On the other hand, there are several progressives such as Katie Porter, Ro Khanna, and Pramila Jayapal who have figured out how to win in affluent districts and there is good reason to believe that their example can be replicated in many other similar districts around the country.
While progressives have yearned for rural voters to become the basis of an economic progressive populism, this vision is mostly rooted in a misinterpretation of the 2016 primary or a nostalgic memory of a Teddy Roosevelt-era populism that hasn’t been resonant for a generation. It’s not based in modern reality. The Democrats who represent rural areas and districts tend to not be populist on either social or economic issues (like Joe Manchin and Collin Peterson). When Democrats built their majority in the 111th Congress based in large parts on strength in rural districts, these members did not work for a populist progressive vision of the party but instead largely worked to water down Obama’s agenda. Meanwhile, Representative Ro Khanna, who represents an affluent district with a median income of $125,000, co-chaired Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign. Pramila Jayapal, who co-chairs the progressive caucus, also represents an upscale Washington congressional district (median income $86,000). Chuy Garcia, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Mark Pocan and Mark Takano also represent urban or dense suburban districts.
Appealing to suburban voters need not require Democrats to move right on economic issues, but even full throated economic populism does not appear sufficient to win back significant segments of the so called white working class. Historically, the white working class in the US has resoundingly rejected multiracial economic populist movements each time they have appeared. Internationally, we see that the Spanish left wing populist party Podemos, founded by leftist academics, is polling worse than the far right anti-immigrant party Vox. In Portugal, where education polarization has not yet taken hold, the socialist government has been able to implement a strong set of reforms which have brought significant material gains for the Portugeuse people, and yet the anti-immigrant populist party Chega is still on the rise. In contrast, the Danish social democratic party has maintained their popularity by turning rightward on immigration, a move that other northern European social democratic parties appear to be considering.
Democrats can and must offer an aspirational vision for a better life for people across the working and middle classes, and follow through on that vision by implementing an agenda that helps people in concrete ways. However, the appeal of the new nationalist right among voters across the entire socioeconomic spectrum is clearly not just a matter of unmet material needs or economic anxiety. In the US, there is not much reason to expect that left economic populism will lead to more than marginal improvements among the white working class, while more significant gains with this bloc require concessions that no progressive should be willing to make.
The movements in 20th century Europe that were the most successful in winning guarantees of social welfare and expanded participation for working people in political and economic life did so by forming broad coalitions that cut across large portions of the working and middle classes. American conservatives have been able to block similar coalitions from forming in the US by using racist dog whistles and a system of exclusionary welfare, where bans on apartments, tax advantaged savings like 401ks and 529s, and burdensome debts are used to systematically deny poor whites and people of color from access to the basic means of life while intentionally targeting benefits to affluent whites.
Now Trump has turned the dog whistles of Reagan into open racial conflict and many well-to-do white suburbanites who have been trending towards social liberalism are repulsed. Simultaneously, exclusionary welfare is increasingly failing the same people it was designed to benefit. The American middle class is firmly in the global 1%, and yet remains just one unexpected medical bill or one job loss away from a downward spiral to economic ruin. Any majoritarian movement will need to win over a substantial number of middle class suburban whites to be successful, and the nascent movement demanding multiracial social democracy is no exception. Historically, such a coalition would have been considered unthinkable, but the walls that have prevented it from forming are beginning to crack.
Winning non-college educated whites into the redistributive coalition will prove to be much more difficult than winning over their college educated counterparts, but there is a path forward. Unions have a proven track record of providing pathways for people from working class backgrounds to get into politics, which is important so that people without college degrees can find themselves better represented in politics. Unions also increase the salience of economic issues among working class whites, where they tend to agree more with Democrats, as opposed to cultural or racial issues, where they tend to agree more with Republicans. The PRO Act would provide a much needed overhaul of labor law and create the conditions for the labor movement to reverse declining membership. Its passage would affirm the rights of millions of workers, and help set the stage for a cross-class coalition that is powerful enough to win major redistributive demands.
The authors thank David Gordon for research assistance.
Sean McElwee (@SeanMcElwee) is co-founder and Executive Director of Data for Progress.
Colin McAuliffe (@ColinJMcAuliffe) is a co-founder of Data for Progress.