I don't know that public shaming will work, but the Republican tax plan is certainly going to hurt. Let's start with that.
I'm not opposed to shaming. I'm just extremely reluctant to have a strategy that relies on people being less shitty.
Even the GOP operatives can buy into the narrative - I saw a tweet yesterday where one was special-pleading about the Virginia election results that they don't really have a presence in the suburbs.
Worth noting that the city of Johnstown went blue in 2016. But yes, fuck the suburbanities.
I don't know if the Republican tax plan will hurt the broad base of well off but not rich suburbanities, though.
I think losing the deduction for medical expenses will fuck over the retired middle class suburbanites. I don't think house prices are high enough that $500,000 will hit the average suburbanite, but it will definitely hit some.
Shut up about the fucking rural voters.
Okay, but I want to point out one thing first: IANAM, but it seems to me that the numbers really support the importance of rural voters from two perspectives: They were Trump's biggest fans, and their votes count more than the votes of the sophisticated urbanites and bonehead suburbanites.
It's true that there are fewer of them, though.
What is pf not? A MAGA? Mathematician? Manatee?
But even in Wyoming, I bet most Trump supporters are not rural. It's a rural state because it's vast and empty, and it's overrepresented because our system is shitty, but that doesn't quite mean that the rural voters in that state are the ones that are actually calling the shots.
The M stands for MANAI, which in turn stands for Man Am Not An IANAM.
I want to aggressively bring suburbs back into the metropoles they belong to. Metropolitan boroughs (with neighborhood assemblies) that bring CBSAs or comparable groupings into unitary tax base and planning processes.
Anyway, the whole issue is fraught with confused definitions. The Trump-breakdown numbers use census definitions of urban vs suburban while the numbers above use (probably more accurate) self-reported definitions.
Also, there are plenty of what you might call firm-jawed yokels who voted for Trump for the same reasons that wealthy, white suburbanites did.
By this is mean both locally-born wealthy people (small business owners, farmers and ranchers who own land) and exurbanites who earn their money in the city but want a "farm". The rural small business owners are probably a lost cause because a $15/hour minimum wage would probably hurt them badly and I think not pushing for a $15/hour minimum wage would do far more damage to the party. (Pushing for a nuanced increase in the minimum wage dependent on local costs of living seems both reasonable and doomed to fail since the Republicans ate the center and shit out the Freedom Caucus.) There is and never was any chance of getting the exurbanites.
The actual farmers might switch votes if Trump fucks them when blowing up NAFTA.
3. My guess is that when a Virginian says "the suburbs" he means the Washington, DC suburbs in northern VA. If that's what he means, he's right that the GOP is scarce there.
When a Virginian says, "I need to go see a man about a horse," he means he's going to piss in the alley.
I want to aggressively bring suburbs back into the metropoles they belong to.
The Trump-breakdown numbers use census definitions of urban vs suburban while the numbers above use (probably more accurate) self-reported definitions.
There was a helpful Twitter exchange yesterday involving Nate Silver and Yggles that led me to this article (not related to politics) that helpfully breaks things down into 6 categories: urban, dense suburban, sprawl suburban, mid-size metro, small metro, and rural.
Basically, streetcar suburbs and other pre-war development are more like cities than sprawl-y places are, and I think what you find is that rural places and the sprawl places (not just exurbs, but most of what's been built since ~1960*) are as reliably red as cities are blue, while the other places have particularities (e.g. I think Colorado Springs and Boulder are both mid-size metros).
*places like Levittown are dense by current standards, but were also built with zero mixed use and 100% auto dependency, so they're an edge case.
16: Even if they're excluding Richmond / Hampton Roads from their meaning of "suburbs", if they didn't have at least a decent presence in the DC suburbs, they would never have had 67 of 100 seats to begin with. Among previously-GOP seats just flipped: 40th (Centreville), 13th (Manassas), 67th (Chantilly), 42nd (Springfield)...
Politics aside, the whole discussion around metros is weird because, frankly, there's no good way to compare (say) Philly and Phoenix, because they simply are apples and oranges. Not only is the Phoenix MSA ~15k square miles to the Philly MSA's 2k, the city of Phoenix itself, which is 1/4 the size of the entire Philly MSA, is only slightly more dense than the Philly MSA, which includes a million acres of NJ Pine Barrens and plenty of farms.
My God, I just realized that the Phoenix MSA is almost double the size of NJ.
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Apple Music has just educated me that there's a song called "Pandora's Golden Heebie Jeebies".
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We're probably not even a small metro, but new housing is being built all over town, and just outside.
It's snowing again today, which is great news because the forecast was calling for freeing rain, and no one wants that.
there's no good way to compare (say) Philly and Phoenix, because they simply are apples and oranges. Not only is the Phoenix MSA ~15k square miles to the Philly MSA's 2k, the city of Phoenix itself, which is 1/4 the size of the entire Philly MSA, is only slightly more dense than the Philly MSA, which includes a million acres of NJ Pine Barrens and plenty of farms.
But there's going to be regions which look absolutely indistinguishable, save the flora: same chain stores, same cheap new developments with the same five floor plans, etc.
Oh no. I just figured it out. Here's the right way to classify the country: you're going to need a contour map by decade of development. I'm not saying the level curves of everything built in 1940 will have the same politics, but I bet it throws everything into relief in the right way.
Either way, I'd love to see it.
24.2: That would be a great map. I'm sure it's been done in broad strokes, but I'd love to see some granularity.
I want to aggressively bring suburbs back into the metropoles they belong to.
It makes me so fucking angry the extent to which sensible zoning regulations drives sprawl, because the lazy developers just don't want to deal. We have so little control over the ETJ here - we're not even allowed to ask them to preserve heritage trees. (And the Texas legislature tried/is trying/maybe succeeded in saying that cities can't preserve heritage trees, which makes me livid.)
What if you named the trees after Confederate generals?
Anyway, the whole issue is fraught with confused definitions. The Trump-breakdown numbers use census definitions of urban vs suburban while the numbers above use (probably more accurate) self-reported definitions.
This is something I worried about, too. Eventually I just sort of mashed it together. But it is clear to me that no one is doing much journalism to get these numbers straight.
Or just any dead white people with odious views?
28. Looking at county-by-county numbers is probably easier than MSAs, because nobody aggregates votes by those. The NYT has the county stuff, but unfortunately I haven't seen any of this stuff in CSV or Excel format.
19. There is a sizable population of Republicans in the NVA suburbs: Arlington, Fairfax, Alexandria, Prince William. However, there are also a lot more Democrats in those counties than Republicans (PW is the most Red by numbers but still went for Hillary). The Norfolk area is also Blue, but not as Blue as NVA.
30: 538 shows its criteria for sorting, which is also by county rather than by MSA, but no more granular than that.
24.2: That would be a great map. I'm sure it's been done in broad strokes, but I'd love to see some granularity.
I'd also be curious to see that map.
Yikes. My home county was 85.9% for Trump. Which brings up another reason for blaming suburbanites over rural voters. You don't need to flip such a large percentage of them.
The transformation of Northern Virginia into a Democratic-leaning area is really kind of startling to me. When I lived there, local government was almost completely dominated by Republicans, and to my eye everything that has happened since then is more terrible sprawliness, so I don't know where these D-voting types are actually living.
In houses so much more expensive than mine that the glare when I say something like, "Of course, nobody but the 1% has a mortgage payment over $1,000 a month."
Another historically Republican area now trending bluer and bluer: Orange County.
Can there be a word like Schadenfrentification, like gentrification, except established Republican deathgrips are being displaced by blue creep?
34. All that sprawliness is Federal workers, and people who work for companies that contract themselves to the Feds, or who lobby the Feds, etc. Most Federal workers are Democrats. When I was a kid in MD, the Confederacy still started in earnest at the Potomac. VA was just beginning to switch from Southern Democrat to Republican. Prince Edward County, which went for Hillary, closed its schools in the late 50s rather than desegregate them. (PE Co. isn't in NVA, though, and I think it's still pretty rural.)
24: That's an awesome idea, and wish I had the time/skills/resources to do it. I tried looking around to see if it had already been done and this is the closest I could find to the relevant data.
27: Canonically trees are named after Union generals, which might be part of the issue.
If you read through that Reddit thread there's a link to a very awesome map of the build date of every building in the Netherlands.
Now that's "Some map" web worthy.
Some of NoVa infill developed along the orange line (as far as Ballston?) but probably not enough to account for a political shift.
I tried to replicate 538's methodology to divide up the country into those six types. I didn't have household data, just population, so I equated 2.58 people with 1 household. I don't have tract-weighted density, just standard density.
Within the Pittsburgh MSA, Allegheny County became "Large metro; High-density suburban" and the remaining six counties "Low-density suburban". The only "urban" counties in all PA were Philadelphia and Delaware counties.
In greater New York, the 5 boroughs plus Nassau, Westchester, Bergen, Middlesex, Essex, Hudson, Union, Passaic were all "Urban"; Suffolk, Monmouth, Morris, Somerset, Rockland "High-density suburban"; Ocean, Orange, Dutchess, Sussex, Hunterdon, Putnam, Pike "Low-density suburban".
In the Bay, only SF and Alameda counties were urban; Contra Costa, San Mateo, and Santa Clara high-density suburban; Marin and San Benito low-density suburban.
I don't know if the above indicates means using unweighted density is problematic.
But at the high level, at least this divides the country into fairly neat packages. Among large metro areas, 21% urban, 15% high-density suburban, 20% low-density suburban; 21% mid-sized metro; 9% small metro; 14% non-metropolitan.
Most Federal workers are Democrats.
Including DoD?
Within the Pittsburgh MSA, Allegheny County became "Large metro; High-density suburban"
Sounds about right. The city is only one quarter the county's population, and we're not very dense.
Does the large amount of public, undeveloped land in The Bay, etc. mess with the stats? Not that I would disagree with those conclusions.
It sounds like "low-density suburban" correlates to what I'd think of as a classically suburban place--the South Bay is suburban but in a different way--but it's confounded by the fact that counties aren't often useful units here.
I thought traditionally Sonoma, Solano, and Napa were Bay Area counties. Does San Benito even have a large, multi-jurisdictional bay?
I think of them as variably Bay Area, not core -- they come in when one wants to be maximal in definition.
These definitions rely heavily on the Census's metropolitan classification. According to the Census, each of those are one-county Metropolitan Statistical Areas (Solano = Vallejo-Fairfield, Sonoma = Santa Rosa, Napa = Napa). Based on their population, Napa would then be classified by 538 as "small metro", the other two "mid-sized metro".
ABAG covers the full nine, which I think came initially out of environmental cooperation efforts, where the physical geography comes more into play than however the census slices things up. The non-bay edges of those counties seem pretty far out of the region, but maybe not much more than the east edges of Alameda and Contra Costa counties. Anyway, Vallejo and even Fairfield are definitely in the Bay Area.
Oh, yeah - they are in the group that's funding the Bay cleanup (Measure AA last year).
I just looked at Solano County, thinking it partially acted as bedroom community for Sacramento too; but it looks like of those Solano residents who commute out-of-county, it's only 7% to Sacramento and 6% to Yolo (e.g. Davis).
Contra Costa, . . . high-density suburban
The difference between Richmond and, say Dublin (or even Clayton) makes this seem like a less than useful scheme.
51: Bzzzt! Dublin isn't in CC, much as it seems it ought to be.
Maybe a better metric would just be census tract density.
30: The NYT has the county stuff, but unfortunately I haven't seen any of this stuff in CSV or Excel format.
County level is never going to be that precise (re: 51) but at least a start
Danville?
Should've just stuck with Clayton.
Looking at the map, I can't believe I forgot Alamo.
45. Including DoD?
I think the DoD and defense industry employees are not a majority, although back in the day it was assumed that DoD people lived in VA and non-DoD lived in MD. I don't know how they vote. I know a lot of DoD contractors and ex-military, and they are not typically fans of Trump. They are not very fond of Hillary or Bernie either, mind, but they are a different sort of right-winger.
I don't have the actual numbers, though: this is anecdotal beyond the first sentence.
I think DoD also employs shitloads of civilians and contractors, some but not all of which are ex-military.
back in the day it was assumed that DoD people lived in VA and non-DoD lived in MD.
This was always my assumption growing up. Maryland was NIH, Virginia was Pentagon.
I still think of VA as pretty heavily militarized, but they've also got the biggest slice of the Washington area's tech industry. I think that having the lions share of the second largest technology center in the country is the major difference between now and 30 years ago.
Since this is the Trumpier thread, what's next for denials of the dossier? We're now at: Ok, they offered to send women to the room, but Trump turned them down.
Next up?
The next denial is: It was 40 years ago and they weren't all 14 years olds.
61. The article I read said Schiller(?) turned them down, and both he and Trump thought it was a joke.
BTW, I am strongly in favor of "firm-jawed yokels" as a term of art.
I am strongly in favor of "firm-jawed yokels" as a term of art.
Not to be confused with "square-jawed yokels".
I am increasingly of the opinion that low population jurisdictions (small suburban towns, small states, microstates) are inherently corrupting and at the root of many of our modern political problems.
It's easier to NIMBY and segregate when you have a tiny suburb of 10k people. The only way to make money when you are a low population jurisdiction is to specifically concentrate wealth in your city/state/country by a) attracting UMC/upper class whites and b) acting as a tax shelter.
We used to have a slow but inevitable process of consolidation of cities, but that has absolutely stopped. Now tiny suburbs/enclaves of big cities (Santa Monica, Daly City, Mercer Island, see the recent article on school boards in the former Confederacy) can totally fuck up local planning and no one has the power to do anything about it. Tiny countries/dependencies (Bermuda, Cayman, Luxembourg, Jersey) can massively distort the worldwide financial system.
Ban microcities/microstates! Set up minimum populations for sub-jurisdictions (e.g. no state can be less than 0.5% of the US population, or no county can be less than 0.5% of the state population)
I mostly agree with that, but city-county consolidation has its own problems. It leads to Rob Fords, putting the city under the political control of the suburbs.
True, but I'm not sure I understand why. Chicago and Toronto have nearly identical populations and areas. But no one worries about the suburbs dominating Chicago politics.
This headline should allow H-G to pre-position her armies in event of a Moore win: "Will Alabama pick a Democrat over Moore? Suburbs will decide".
69: Yes. At present, the area and population of the incorporated areas of Chicago and Toronto are both quite close. However, the Chicago metropolitan area has nearly twice the population of that of Toronto. So roughly 50% of Toronto met. in the city while it is a little more than 25% in Chicago.
And at the time of consolidation the consolidated area represented a much larger share of the Toronto metro area.
71: I don't follow. Are you saying the Chicago suburbs contain 25% of population, versus 50% in Toronto?
Saying what Stormcrow said in a bunch of different ways: Although the cities have comparable populations, Chicago metro is much larger than Toronto metro. Chicago has a much larger collection of suburbs surrounding it than Toronto does, even post consolidation. The consolidated Toronto city is over 50% of the Toronto metro's population, while Chicago city is only about one fourth of its metro area's population. There are a lot more suburbanities in the Chicago area living outside the city, both proportionally and absolutely. Thus, we can consider Chicago non-consolidated. Or, alternatively: Toronto's consolidated captured a very large portion of the suburbanities (although it looks like there's been more growth beyond the new city bounds since then).
"suburbanities", presumably the study of white flight, should be "suburbanites"
I agree with 67 in its entirety.
73: Thanks. I was clearly unclear.
What happened? I posted an article here hours ago. The headline was something like "Will Moore lose to a Democrat in Alabama? Suburbs will decide."
Oh, and then this happened. Weird. When I clicked here from the home page (having visited 3 other threads in the meantime), it was still on comment 69.
As a consolidation proponent upthread (had lost track of this thread), I think it is definitely true that full suburban incorporation will drag cities more to the right than they would otherwise be - usually more quietly and less ridiculously than under Rob Ford, who was something of a fluke - but the upsides of unified land use planning and decisionmaking are worth it. What's the benefit of having a cast of midnight-blue electeds if nobody can afford to live in the jurisidiction anyway?
Kevin Drum mentions suburbs today (quoteing Thomas Edsall):
Will Stancil, a research fellow at the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity who created the chart, explained...."To the extent Trump really resonated, it was in heavily-white areas -- and that includes exurbs at the urban fringe, rural areas, and many heavily white second-ring suburbs," Stancil wrote in his email. "It was his message resonating in those areas that gave him a fighting chance at all."