#exurbs

I know this ^^^ is the suburbs. Green lawns, very uniform houses, no diversity of lot types. When I hear people talk about “suburbs,” I often hear them talking about this. But sometimes when people talk about “the suburbs,” they mean this:

More trees, and the layout is a big less regular. Still green lawns, for the most part, and houses on the nicer side. But suburbs are also apparently this:

Back to the dense layout, but there’s a grid-like shape thats closer to the urban areas it surrounds, and often the houses are alongside a road that runs right up through that urban area; there’s less of a border. Oh and sometimes the suburbs are this, or this, or this, or this:

Sometimes the sidewalks are directly off the road. Sometimes there’s a grass border. Sometimes there’s no sidewalks at all. Sometimes the roads are marked. Sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes neighborhoods are on through roads, sometimes they’re dead ends, or cul-de-sacs.

Ravinia, DeKalb County, Georgia. Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates, 1985. 

While U.S. population growth is slowing, Americans are flocking to boomtowns far outside major cities. Source link

The road to political power runs through the suburbs and exurbs. Not a HUGE surprise, but we were again reminded of this in the November elections.

Republicans insist on alienating people there with their hardline MAGA ideology and authoritarianism. Democrats have benefited by default, but to ensure victory in the burbs we need to be more proactive and do more grassroots organizing there.

The victories Democrats racked up on Tuesday night spanned safe blue states, Trump country, and one-time battlegrounds: A popular governor was re-elected in Kentucky; Virginia Democrats flipped control of the state house and kept their majority in the state senate; Democrats reversed GOP gains in New Jersey’s legislature; Pennsylvania voters delivered a Democratic romp in statewide contests; and the liberal positions won big in Ohio’s two ballot measures to enshrine the right to an abortion and to legalize marijuana. Post-election vote totals show that much of that success was due to a very specific kind of American: affluent, college-educated voters who are likely to live in the suburbs of metropolitan areas. In Kentucky, that means the areas in and around Louisville, where vote totals from the secretary of state’s office show that Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear improved his 2019 margins by nearly 10 percentage points; the counties in and around Lexington, where he improved by an average of 9 points; and in the three northern counties that sit across the state line from Cincinnati, Ohio, where vote totals show he improved by an average of 3 points. Ohio was a similar story: The “Yes” vote on Issue 1, which protects reproductive rights, saw its biggest support come from major urban centers and their suburbs, where it performed better than the Democratic Senate nominee in last year’s elections. Vote totals tallied by the New York Times show the “Yes” vote performing 6 points better in and around Cleveland, 11 points better in neighboring Lorain County, and 8 points better in nearby Summit County. It also won the vote outright in five other neighboring counties that Democrats lost last year. This picture also appeared in the suburbs of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, where vote totals reported by these states show a common theme: Suburbs, and places with higher concentrations of wealthier and better-educated voters, swung to the left. It’s a trend that’s been largely true since the dawn of the Trump era: Republicans have been consistently struggling to perform as well as they once did in the suburbs, giving Democrats an opening to persuade and turn out voters that are crucial to winning statewide races in battleground states.

Extremism and instability have increasingly become identified with Republicans. It's not just Trump's unhinged rantings but also the constant threats by the GOP to shut down government, politicize law enforcement, weaken national security, and cut programs that help the middle class in order to provide more tax breaks for the filthy rich.

This trend has held strong since 2016, when suburban and college-educated voters lurched away from Donald Trump for Hillary Clinton. They had been much more likely to side with Republicans as recently as 2014: In Northern Virginia, Virginia Beach, and the Richmond suburbs, Republicans had won or run nearly even with Democrats in the suburbs; the same was true in places like suburban Colorado, Georgia, and Wisconsin in 2012 and 2014. In the “blue wave” of the 2018 midterms, these more diverse and highly educated regions voted out Republican members of Congress. And the suburban shift contributed much of the margin of support that buoyed Joe Biden to victory in battleground states in 2020 and helped Democratic candidates win in close midterm elections last year. The common line? Ideological polarization around social issues and Trump’s brand of politics.

Progressive stability and rights is a message that works.

John Hood recently wrote a curious column about the rise of the Republican Party in North Carolina. Much of it is right. The number of registered Democrats has been shrinking continuously for decades. The number of registered Republicans has been growing. However, the shift to unaffiliated is the really story. The GOP controls two-thirds of the state’s county boards of commission and more local…