It's the Suburbs, Stupid

The suburbs have spoken, but last week's seeming rebuke to the GOP may not be the burbs last word. Despite the Republican's Suburban Agenda, promising attention to schools, college costs and other domestic matters, the suburbs were mostly responsible for the drubbing the GOP took. "A majority of the seats the party gained in taking control of Congress were either wholly or partly suburban," said Newsday columnist Lawrence C. Levy, pointing out that it was the first time the suburbs nationally didn't go Republican.

In Illinois, the suburban districts west of Chicago, historically strongly Republican, instead gave the Democrats a "supermajority" in the state Senate in Springfield. (The Illinois suburban GOP also lost, in the resignation of defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a man whose career they jump-started in the early 1960s. But this story says they lost him long ago.)

In Washington state, "the drubbing was so complete that seats flipped in Spokane and traditionally Republican Puget Sound suburbs," reported the King County Journal. In New York, incumbent Sen. Hillary Clinton won in Long Island's rock-ribbed Republican suburbs, where she was tromped in 2000. In Massachusetts, governor-elect Deval Patrick scored his biggest wins in the tony burbs west of Boston.

But the Democrats, according to Levy, didn't lure suburbanites left as much as the GOPs presumed too much. Levy portrays the suburban rebellion as not an extreme reaction to either the war or the deficit, but a reaction against extremist politics. "Suburbanites are not anti-change, just anti-extremism of any stripe," he wrote. "They're not anti-government. Many people move here for more and better government services. And they're not anti-tax. They're willing to pay high taxes, to a point, if they feel they're getting good value."

And the suburbs may be growing more conservative. In Dallas, Republican judges lost last week not in the anti-Iraq tsunami, but because their conservative Anglo constituents have been moving out of the city to the suburbs, as they have in other southern cities. And in other places, a suburban/exurban split is developing. In Oregon, "Washington County … long-considered the state’s bellwether, seems to be trending blue, largely thanks to the explosive growth in its close-to-Portland suburbs over the last decade," reports the Gazette Times. Clackamas County, with its fast-growing exurbs—20 miles or more from downtown Portland—is still up for grabs, analysts from both sides say."

The fight for the suburbs, in other words, has just begun.