How did President Bush find so many votes out there in “the sticks”?
How is it that the Democratic Party and the prognosticators of the mainstream media “missed” all those people in the Red States -- in “nowhere country”?
Well, if you want a clear view of what happened, consider this demographic reality: for some time, now, the nation’s cities have been bleeding out middle-class people -- fleeing the urban life in droves.
They had to go somewhere.
They went out to those “country” spaces that have been filling up with massive, spread-out, newly built semi-towns -- both residential and work areas -- called “exurbias” (“extended suburbs”).
The people going there are mostly young, with children; they're often upwardly-mobile, sometimes entrepreneurs, and are looking to own their own homes and join giant mega-churches and find space and safety in a new life: but with the values-atmosphere that supports them rather than undermines them (as the big cities did). There are more of these people than the nation’s cultural elite ever suspected.
The political fallout has been explosive.
David Brooks anticipated the phenomena in a book (that I highly recommend) published just before the election: On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense [New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004].
He discussed this in his 11/9/04 column in the New York Times -- “Take a Ride to Exurbia” (site needs registration), where he said:
“My book started with Witold Rybczynski's observation that America's population is decentralizing faster than any other society's in history. People in established suburbs are moving out to vast sprawling exurbs that have broken free of the gravitational pull of the cities and now exist in their own world far beyond.
“Ninety percent of the office space built in America in the 1990's was built in suburbia, usually in low office parks along the interstates. Now you have a tribe of people who not only don't work in cities, they don't commute to cities or go to the movies in cities or have any contact with urban life. You have these huge, sprawling communities with no center. Mesa, Ariz., for example, has more people than St. Louis or Minneapolis….
“I was about to give a reading in Berkeley when I asked a few of the bookstore employees if they sold many copies of Rick Warren's book, ‘The Purpose-Driven Life.’ They weren't familiar with the book, even though it has sold millions and millions of copies. I realized there are two conversations in this country. I was in the establishment conversation, but somehow I needed to get into the Rick Warren conversation….
“That's why I'm so impressed by Karl Rove. As a group of Times reporters demonstrated in Sunday's paper, the Republicans achieved huge turnout gains in exurbs like the ones in central Florida. The Republicans permeated those communities, and spread their message.”
Joel Kotkin has written an excellent piece -- “Democrats out of touch with America” in the 11/7/04 Arizona Republic -- available on his website that points out:
“Much of the story can be seen in three sets of statistics -- demographic, economic and finally political. Wherever there has been strong economic and demographic growth, generally speaking, the Republican tide flowed. Where job and population increases have been weak, the Democrats scored big….The economic and demographic fault lines in California and elsewhere do not favor the Democrats in their current configuration.”
Here are some extended quotes from Kotkin’s article:
“Even in California, which went for Kerry but not as overwhelmingly as might have been expected, the political fault-lines followed these same patterns. Kerry piled up huge majorities in the San Francisco Bay area, which has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs and has experienced strong net out-migration since 2000. Bush won handily in Riverside-San Bernardino and the Central Valley, winning upward of three-fifths the vote in the emergent ‘Third California’ that is experiencing the bulk of the Golden State's population and job growth.
“These inland areas are where Arnold Schwarzenegger won his election during the recall and where, by 2008, a Republican like a John McCain or Rudy Giuliani could sweep the nation's most populous state back to the GOP. If that happens, the Democratic Party as we know it will be all but moribund….
“Like Boston, many Democratic strongholds -- Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Chicago -- all lost population since 2000. Some of these cities had much ballyhooed revivals during the late 1990s with often highly celebrated, but statistically tiny, increases in downtown lofts, arts venues and other measurements of urban ‘hipness.’ But viewed from a regional perspective, these regions continued to lose both jobs and middle-class families to the periphery.
“In contrast, the sprawling metro areas -- from Atlanta to Phoenix and California's Inland Empire -- have continued to gain both population and jobs. The Southeast, for example, now stands as the home to more large corporate headquarters than any region, confirming a shift in economic fortunes from the urban boutiques of the Northeast and the Pacific Coast.
“The Democrats increasingly have identified themselves ever more with stagnant or shrinking urban centers. The most overwhelmingly Democratic cities, like Seattle, Boston or San Francisco, are also the cities with the lowest percentages of children. This allows them to take their signals on social issues such as gay marriage from the reigning hip-ocracy, often alienating voters with children.
“In contrast, many GOP strongholds, particularly outer-ring suburbs and exurbs like San Bernardino Riverside, have been becoming favored grounds for raising families. These voters represent roughly two out of five voters, and far outweigh the population of gays or young singles. Concentrated in the suburbs, these voters went more for Bush this year than in 2000.
“Overall, Democrats increasingly seem clueless in finding ways to appeal to people with children or those seeking a new life in an affordable place. Instead they often ask suburbanites to subsidize trendy downtown development and attack their way of life as anti-environmental ‘sprawl.’ Suburbanites on the periphery are accorded little honor among Democrats; not surprisingly, they were not well-rewarded for their attitudes….
“Nor, finally, did the Democratic economic message resonate as well with people in the suburban hinterland. The attack on the ‘rich’ -- odd enough from a man married to a billionairess who pays a smaller share of her income in taxes than the average housepainter -- were rightly interpreted by many small-business people as an attack on either their current income, or on where they hoped to be in a few years.
“The Kerry economic plan was more convincing to other constituencies such as public employees, subsidized artists, downtown property speculators, public bond traders and university researchers, all of whom might well have benefited from more public spending on higher education, subsidies for cultural institutions and other favored amenities. Not surprisingly, educated people, particularly academics and others with post-graduate degrees, emerged as both Kerry's largest source of funding and his strongest political base.
“Given these realities, is there any hope -- or even a need -- for a Democratic Party? The answer is assuredly yes, but only with massive changes….At very least, the nation deserves some progressive alternative to the baldly pro-corporate policies of the Republican Party.
“This can occur only in a Democratic Party that espouses middle-class values, not elite values, that celebrates upward mobility, not celebrity. It must be a party that can communicate with middle-class people where they live and work….
“More than anything this will require a redefinition of the party's core constituency and its priorities. Today, the Democrats' true center lies with the most privileged portions of society -- Hollywood, the Wall Street municipal bond traders, the professoriate, the major media moguls. The issues that these people care most about are those that reflect their personal interests, such as keeping their neighborhoods and recreational playgrounds pristine, helping gay friends get married, sending more public funds to elite educational institutions or financing medical research for diseases and the aging process that money alone can not ward off.
“These causes, however valid, do not constitute a winning political platform. Even worse, the overwhelming elite influence has also proved pernicious, since many among them also possess an instinctive dislike for American military power, and favor a more European approach to defending America's national interests.”
Posted by Rick Penner at November 13, 2004 12:19 AM