An underappreciated challenge of the present era in American politics—a challenge for policymakers, for candidates and their staffs, for pollsters, for journalists—is defining what now counts as “suburban.” Over the last half-century, suburban voters came to be recognized as a bloc distinct from urban and rural voters. By the 1992 presidential election, suburban voters were casting more votes than urban and rural voters combined.
But across those decades, the nature of the suburbs evolved. What we nowadays call suburbs look very different from place to place: The older suburbia of the Northeast is quite different from the newer suburbia surrounding cities in the West. We should not assume that the dynamics of age and race and income levels in the populations living in cul-de-sac-ville across the country are identical. CONTINUED
Daniel McGraw, The Bulwark
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