Morning Jay: Can Romney Win Back the Wealthy Suburbs?
6:00 AM, APR 20, 2012 • BY JAY COST
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The conventional wisdom in American politics is that Democrats win poor voters, Republicans win the rich, and the two sides battle over the middle class. That used to be true – indeed, that was basically the case during the earliest Whig-Democratic battles in the 1830s and 1840s, and the Truman/Dewey contest of 1948 was a pretty straightforward class conflict. But those traditional class cleavages have really broken down in the last quarter century or so.
The GOP in the South was once limited to the growing suburbs around “New South” cities like Dallas and Tampa, but lately the party has made headway in downscale areas like southern Georgia and northeast Mississippi, as well as border states like West Virginia and Kentucky. At the same time, Democrats have been on the rise in the wealthier suburbs of the major Northern cities.
It’s this latter group of voters I want to talk about today. They once used to be a mainstay in the Republican coalition, but no longer. Can Romney win them back?
To appreciate the decline of the GOP in these suburban, upscale areas, I want to look at the GOP “tilt” of four, once classically Republican suburban counties – Westchester County, New York (outside New York City), Montgomery County, Pennsylvania (outside Philadelphia), Lake County, Illinois (outside Chicago), and Orange County California (outside Los Angeles). All four of these counties had been onetime anchors of postwar Republicanism, but they have all trended remarkably toward the Democrats.
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