In 2016, Donald Trump narrowly beat Hillary Clinton in America's suburbs and won the White House. In 2020, Joe Biden turned that around. He captured 54 % of suburban voters, an improvement of nine percentage points over Clinton's performance. And that was key to putting Biden in the White House.
This year, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are battling for that crucial suburban support. And there are reasons to think that, for Harris, the suburbs are a land of opportunity. You can see the struggle playing out in competing lawn signs in the front yards of America's suburban neighborhoods.
As Lawrence Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, told me in episode three of the Now It’s History podcast, those voters have moved to the suburbs because they “want better schools for their kids. They want more space. They own their own little plot, their own portion of the suburban dream. And they’re optimistic…they tend to shy away from extremism of any stripe. So the party and the candidates that come across as a little too far out there make them nervous.”
Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden Sunday gave a platform to extreme voices. The New York Times piece on the event was headlined, “Trump Rally Opens With Insults Aimed at Latino, Black, Jewish and Arab American Voters.”
Harris leads Trump by seven percentage points in suburban areas, according to a Wall Street Journal poll of seven battleground states. The Journal’s John McCormick reported last week from Mequon, Wisconsin that “Trump has alienated a sizable share of college-educated suburban voters who help decide presidential elections, accelerating their drift from the Republican Party. Harris needs them to counteract softness in her support among Black and Hispanic men…
As McCormick wrote, “The country’s political fault line was once the cleave between Democratic cities and Republican suburbs. That division now increasingly runs through the suburbs themselves, with inner-ring enclaves like this one turning purple or blue and outer ones—and rural areas—remaining red.”
The shift away from Trump in the suburbs was “fairly dramatic” in the 2020 election, Levy noted. It came about “because Trump began to be seen not as a wealthy businessman who could help turn the economy around but as an extremist who frightened them.”
In this podcast episode, Levy also describes the strategies that can win votes in the suburbs. He discusses the surprising importance of New York State’s competitive congressional races in potentially determining which party controls the House in the next Congress and explains why people from around the world are paying attention to what happens.
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