Editor’s Note: Lawrence C. Levy is executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University and a former columnist and editorial writer at Newsday who has covered eight presidential elections. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.
Once again, moderate suburban voters got their way and this year determined that Joe Biden will get the keys to the White House.
While we’ve seen the suburbs shift from red to purple and blue since the early 1990s, these voters delivered a message to both parties this year: Change, yes, but not so far, not so fast and not so furious.
The question is whether Democratic progressives and Republican conservatives are listening. From self-styled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes to Donald Trump wannabes, firebrands from both parties must understand that rallying the base and taking a more polarized position might work in the primaries but appealing to moderates is the key to winning general elections.
As we’ve seen with Biden, middle ground consensus or compromise isn’t always a cop-out to be avoided at all costs. As Trump learned, moderate “swing” suburbanites prefer to be soothed, not scared.
In the 40 years that I’ve been conducting research and writing about the suburbs as a journalist and academic, one thing has been abundantly clear: suburbanites tend to shy away from what they see as extremism of any stripe.
This suburban sensibility cost Democrats during the counterculture battles and protests against the Vietnam War in the 60s and 70s that many blue-collar Democrats saw as unpatriotic. It also hurt Democrats in the 70s and 80s when suburbanites feared crime waves in large metropolitan areas could spread to their own neighborhoods. The party also took a hit soon after the 1992 election of Bill Clinton, whose moderate, triangulating instincts made the party seem safer to suburbanites. The backlash against Clinton’s 1993 Health Security Act, nicknamed “Hillarycare” by Republicans, was swift. Moderates saw the health care reform package as an example of the federal government’s overreach, and it helped usher in the GOP’s Gingrich Revolution.
Moderates have also been turned off when Republicans strayed too far to the right. Ironically, it was the overzealousness of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s pursuit in impeaching President Clinton, and his promotion of an uncomfortable “revolutionary” social and fiscal agenda that marked the start of the Suburban Retreat from the national GOP.
According to exit polls, suburban voters turned – and turned out – against President Donald Trump this year. In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the suburbs 49% to 45%.
In Election 2020, Biden outpaced Trump 50% to 48%. As a mirror of the nation, it’s not surprising that the two-point gap between the candidates nearly reflected the three-point gap in the national popular vote totals.
A superb study of 373 suburban counties by The New York Times provides further evidence of the suburban shift. Biden averaged about 4.6 percentage points better among suburbanites than Clinton. He did even better in Georgia, widening the gap to eight points. And while it was only three points in Michigan and Wisconsin, the additional suburban votes may have been enough to flip those states Democratic.
In Pennsylvania, which literally turned out to be the 2020 Keystone State, most of the media attention seemed to be on Philadelphia. But it wasn’t the “Brotherly Love” in the city that put Biden over the top. Trump’s paltry 18% there was actually three points better than he did four years ago. It was being blown away in the four Philadelphia “collar” suburbs and suburban-ruralishexurbs beyond them that proved decisive this year.
In the Atlanta suburbs, Biden’s net gains over Hillary Clinton’s performance was even more powerful, with increases in individual counties higher than that in the traditionally Democratic city itself. Where Clinton scored 69% in Atlanta’s Fulton County and Biden 73%, suburban DeKalb County voters gave the now President-elect an amazing 83% on 17% higher turnout.
In Michigan, another competitive state, Oakland County, a longtime Republican suburb outside Detroit continued its swift shift from red to blue by handing Biden at least 56,000 net votes more than Clinton, more than reversing her shocking statewide deficit four years earlier. By contrast, in Detroit, which most Democrats were watching intently as the votes rolled in, Biden did no better percentagewise than Clinton on similarly higher turnout.
It’s clear that moderate suburban voters were turned off by Trump in both style and substance, and his strategy of stoking race-based fears may have backfired. Poll after poll during the campaign showed the President underwater on issues suburbanites cared about, from the environment and health care to race relations and, most importantly Covid-19. His standing was especially low with minority suburbanites, who comprise an increasing share of the suburbanites, and suburban women, the so-called Volvo moms, who appeared to be abandoning President Trump in droves.
But in the 2020 election, the suburbs seem to have rendered a decidedly split decision, which could give Republicans hope that they’ve slowed or stopped their suburban slide heading into a post-Trump era.
Down ballot, it was the Democrats who paid a price this year in many swing suburban congressional districts. The Blue Wave of 2018, which washed away many Republican incumbents and challengers from once reliably suburban seats, receded significantly. Instead of expanding their majority, congressional Democrats lost ground in suburban and exurban neighborhoods, where suburbanites worried about the party’s seeming leftward tilt, as reflected in the growing number of outspokenly progressive members (some of whom identify as democratic socialists). And that gave a lot of moderates pause.
Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger put the blame squarely on progressives tossing around phrases like “defunding the police” and “socialism,” as if every district were in bright blue Manhattan. “We need to not ever use the words ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. Because while people think it doesn’t matter, it does matter. And we lost good members because of it,” she said during a call with her colleagues.
No, the Democratic underperformance nationwide wasn’t enough to lose control of the House – overall, the party still held most of their gains. And changing demographics are working in the Democrats’ favor. People of color, who tend to vote Democratic, are the fastest growing group in suburban communities. But, hopefully, the 2020 results were enough to remind Democrats – particularly impatient progressives – that the zeal for quick, transformational change could threaten the party’s hold on power and make it more difficult to achieve its goals. While many suburban voters have come to embrace progressive causes over the years, from same-sex marriage and abortion rights to environmental protection and even income equality, they have tended to do so gradually.
For those on the left and right who saw Joe Biden as a joke or worse, his success in suburbs throughout the nation should give them pause. They should see him not as an ideological impediment but as the embodiment of a widely appealing middle ground. And they should see the suburbs as a place from where compromise and consensus solutions can gain acceptance.
In the end, Biden, with all his imperfections, was the perfect suburban candidate. It wasn’t only his instinct for the middle, which manifested itself in both style and substance. This is a man who lived for decades in a suburban community in Delaware, and even from the exalted perch of a US Senator, engaged with his neighbors and commuted every weekday by train. Biden speaks the language of moderate suburbanites.
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Former President Barack Obama may have chosen Biden as his running mate in 2008 based on his foreign policy chops and relationships with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. But it was Biden’s ability to attract moderate, suburban swing voters that proved most valuable to Obama.
The choice of Biden paid off for the urban and urbane Obama – just as the party’s nomination of Biden has worked with the suburban gatekeepers through whose portal all presidents must pass.
