GOP Plants Flag on New Voting Frontier

Los Angeles Times ^ | November 22, 2004 | Ronald Brownstein and Richard Rainey, Times Staff Writers

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Bush's huge victory in the fast-growing areas beyond the suburbs alters the political map.

WASHINGTON — The center of the Republican presidential coalition is moving toward the distant edges of suburbia.

In this month's election, President Bush carried 97 of the nation's 100 fastest-growing counties, most of them "exurban" communities that are rapidly transforming farmland into subdivisions and shopping malls on the periphery of major metropolitan areas.
Together, these fast-growing communities provided Bush a punishing 1.72 million vote advantage over Democrat John F. Kerry, according to a Times analysis of election results. That was almost half the president's total margin of victory.

"These exurban counties are the new Republican areas, and they will become increasingly important to Republican candidates," said Terry Nelson, the political director for Bush's reelection campaign. "This is where a lot of our vote is."

These growing areas, filled largely with younger families fleeing urban centers in search of affordable homes, are providing the GOP a foothold in blue Democratic-leaning states and solidifying the party's control over red Republican-leaning states.

They also represent a compounding asset whose value for the Republican Party has increased with each election: Bush's edge in these 100 counties was almost four times greater than the advantage they provided Bob Dole, the Republican presidential nominee eight years ago.

In states like Ohio, Minnesota and Virginia, Republican strength in these outer suburbs is offsetting Democratic gains over the last decade in more established — and often more affluent — inner-tier suburbs. As Democrats analyze a demoralizing defeat in this month's presidential election, one key question they face is whether they can reduce the expanding Republican advantage on the new frontier between suburbs and countryside.

"When any party is losing a growing group of voters, that's a problem —

[Grampa Dave]

This phenom is really interesting and amazing up here in N California. The result is like the article pointed out, the fast growing areas in many counties are people like you and our younger relatives and young friends we know.

So many customers have left our cable company to get FNC or never signed up for cable, now the cable company is now including FNC in its basic package. Many of these young people that we know are not even opting for the local channel packages with their satellite system.

If the trend of cancelling local channels grows, the negative impact on the Rat 527's will be tremendous. Our DIL in N. California said that several of her neighbors have cancelled their local tv option with their satellite providers. One nieghbor lady while cancelling it was asked if there was anything wrong with the reception, and she said no. Then, the lady with the satellite service asked, "Don't you want to know what is going on locally?"

Her neighbor responded, "Our local channels are from San Francisco, and I don't my kids being brainwashed with local Gay agenda!"

I would like to see Congress allow us to use E coast or Midwest Broadcasts to watch what few network shows we watch on Dish. That way we could watch them early and go to bed. These are a handful of shows: Navy CSI, Joan of Arcadia and Jag, which seems to be jumping the PC shark again. Then our local channels from Gay Frisco would not receive any money from us.

[calreaganfan]

"When we revisit the state in 20 years, the picture may be entirely different."

It will take at least that long. The sad thing is that until recently, CA was a Republican state. Up to 1992, CA was almost always in the Republican column. A lot of Dems have moved to the urban counties from out of state. Because counties like Santa Clara, San Mateo, Contra Costa, Sonoma and Alameda are still experiencing job growth, these counties continue to grow in population which will make it very difficult for future Republican candidates. Also, many Californians are moving to ID, NV, AZ, NM and other mountain states which drains the state of conservatives.

[traviskicks]

Excellent article! A must read. These reporters are forgetting the reason why electoral votes are increasing in Red States. It’s cuz businesses are moving there and their economies are growing because Conservative economic policies work! As an example, this is what liberalism did to California:

Liberalism in a nutshell!

[Plutarch]

...most of them "exurban" communities that are rapidly transforming farmland into subdivisions and shopping malls on the periphery of major metropolitan areas.

So these are the "rural" areas upon which the Legacy Media harps. Suburban subdivisions. You'd have thunk it was overall wearing, plow driving, turnip truck riding hayseeds providing Bush with this outsize margins in these "rural" counties.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Is there a link and story with that interesting Graphic?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

So these are the "rural" areas upon which the Legacy Media harps.

The power of spinning blow away by the facts!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Her neighbor responded, "Our local channels are from San Francisco, and I don't my kids being brainwashed with local Gay agenda!"

Love it!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Correction : blow should be blown.

[traviskicks]

Is there a link and story with that interesting Graphic?
---

It is from a rather long research type paper on welfare. Here is a summary:

http://www.neoperspectives.com/summary.htm

The actual paper can be linked through it. Here are some more relevent excerpts - regarding Georgia in the above preposted graph - atlanta georigia is home to the largest black middle class in America:


Colbert King doesn't say where he got his data from, but just from this raw data I found here it is clear that, at minimum, more African Americans are on Welfare in New York and California then in any southern state. The greatest percentage of African Americans on Welfare is in the District of Colombia. His attempt to disparage the south, an area which, despite being historically poorer, has lower percentages of it's children on welfare and is becoming a growing bastion of African American prosperity (probably for this reason) and then to link this to the Confederacy shows complete ignorance. Even if the Southern States had higher percentages of African Americans on their welfare rolls than the national average (which might indeed be the case) then these states have the most to gain - not loose- from Welfare Reform!

I wonder what Colbert King would think of blackenterprise.com's analysis (170):

Survey respondents placed a high priority on income earnings potential, cost of living, housing prices, and entrepreneurial opportunities. When BE first published this list in 2001, four of the top 10 cities were in the South. This year seven out of 10 are below the Mason-Dixon Line. Five out of 10 have a black mayor, and all have a black population of at least 25%.

Atlanta, Georgia, ranks as the No. 1 city for African Americans, driven primarily by entrepreneurial opportunities, earnings potential, and cultural activities. Future job growth is strong at 23%, and Atlanta is home to a high number of black-owned businesses. African Americans make up 61% of Atlanta’s population. (170)


Colbert King is only right about one thing: that African Americans would be the group most affected by Welfare Reform. What about other black leaders in and out of Congress? There must have been a curious alliance of African Americans, who traditionally vote 90% Democratic, and Republicans over the issue of Welfare Reform? Surely no African American leader would echo the Democrat party line against progress for their own people and constituents? African American leaders must have experienced the scourge of Welfare firsthand in their districts and be absolutely livid at the poverty and family dissolution that accompanied Welfare dependency?

Sadly, the exact opposite occurred. Mainstream African American leaders fought in favor of the continued subjugation of their own people. Again, this is how dangerous some of the ideas of liberalism are. It can brainwash even the leaders of the very people who have had welfare stomped on them for over 60 years, to the point where even their caring, educated standard bearers don't believe in the strength and competence of their own people. These African American leaders believed that poorer African Americans needed government help to fight their way out of poverty - that they would be unable to do it themselves. Caught up in their condescending compassion, they could not bring themselves to believe that the very help that they fought to bring their constituents, was the hopelessness and despair they sought to alleviate.

[southernnorthcarolina]

Greetings from exurbia -- specifically, Union County, NC, prominently mentioned in the article (and an excellent one it is; many thanks for posting it, Ernest). As goldstategop and others have said, the rise of the GOP in exurban counties has been underreported -- either not noticed by the media, or, more likely, willfully ignored.

Union County, southeast of Charlotte, is the fastest growing county in North Carolina. Charlotte's "inner ring" of suburbs lies within the same county as Charlotte -- Mecklenburg -- which is physically large enough to have contained the large majority of the city's suburban growth up to the 1980s or so. Since then, suburbanization has spilled into adjacent counties, hastened by Mecklenburg's declining schools, increasing crime rates, and spiraling tax increases (necessitated in part by Charlotte's determination to implement commuter rail, and thereby become a "world class city"). And, not coincidentally, Mecklenburg County was one of the relative handful of counties in the nation to have switched from red to blue this year.

Union County lies in the path of middle and high income suburbanization (what our local liberal paper, the Charlotte Observer, calls "sprawl," but what we call "breathing room"). And it shows in the election returns:

1996
Dole (R) 18,802 (57.0%)
Clinton (D) 11,525 (35.0%)
Perot (I) 2,477 (7.5%)
Others 166 (0.5%)

2000
Bush (R) 31,876 (67.2%)
Gore (D) 14,890 (31.6%)
Others 395 (0.8%)

2004
Bush (R) 42,266 (70.4%)
Kerry (D) 17, 639 (29.4%)
Other 168 (0.3%)

The continuing shift to the GOP, in what was a solidly Democratic county until the 1980s, is impressive. But focus on the total vote: 32,790 in 1996; 47,161 in 2000; and 60,073 in 2004. That's an increase of 83.2% in eight years!

Some Democrats hereabouts have been consoling themselves with the fact that North Carolina is seeing a continuous influx of transplants from the north. If folks from New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey are moving here in large numbers, their logic goes, since those are blue states, it's only a matter of time before North Carolina becomes a blue state. Bzzzt... wrong. Here in Union County these days, you can't swing a cat by its tail without smacking a dozen Yankees (not that I'd do such a thing). But look again at the election numbers. Do you see a trend to the Dems? I don't think so. The simple fact is that we're not getting a cross-section of people from the north; rather, we're getting corporate transferees and entrepreneurs, many with spouses and kids. To put it perhaps a bit cruelly, those who can leave Jersey do leave Jersey, and they tend to be conservative and Republican.

You could tell from the President's campaign schedule that a major focus was being placed on the exurbs. A wise decision, indeed, and one which should continue going forward. Anyone interested in county minutia should also take a gander at the trends in Williamson County, Tennessee (exurban Nashville) over the past several election cycles. The numbers are mind-boggling.

[Torie]

This fringe suburbia thing has been going on since rocks cooled. It is NOT a new phenomena. You see, younger families like to move to new neighborhoods, with have lots of other parents with young children, and cheaper housing, and decent schools. That element tends these days to be very conservative in general, but then it always was right of center. The ring of new neighborhoods just keeps moving out from the center, like the rings of a tree.

[EricT.]

Wait around a while, and JAG & Navy CSI will be on A&E, SpikeTV, or someother satellite/cable channel.

[southernnorthcarolina]

I agree the exurban phenominon is nothing new, but it hasn't received much attention in the media (one exception: Joel Garreau's book Edge City, a must-read for those interested in the topic).

The numbers look particularly startling in mid-sized metro areas such as Charlotte and Nashville, which until fairly recently had the bulk of their suburban growth contained in the same county as the center city. Extreme southeastern (and suburban) Mecklenburg County, of which Charlotte is the seat, voted for President Bush by 60 to 70% margins. But those numbers were obscured to all but political junkies by inner city returns which tipped Mecklenburg as a whole to Kerry.

To those who hadn't been paying close attention, the percentages, especially when considered along with the explosive growth, of places such as Union County, are rather eye-popping.

It's not just politics, but demographics in general: I don't think the exurbs have been getting their due. In the Charlotte area, and I'm sure elsewhere, we're being bombarded by press praise of "new urbanism," the "back to the city" movement, and the supposed benefits of mass transit (rail in particular) and the high density zoning which accompanies it. Problem is (though one rarely sees it reported, at least in the Charlotte Observer), folks aren't buying it. The pejorative "sprawl" is invariably used when it is mentioned. To the urbanists, one acre-plus lots, old oak and beech trees, red-tailed hawks, deer, neighborhood schools, low property taxes, and solidly GOP voting patterns are some sort of sin. God, I hate it for them...

[Torie]

Yep. The figure I look at (and the only one worth looking at) is the trend in larger metro areas as a whole, including fringe areas. Bush got pounded in those in 2000 north of the Mason Dixon line in general, except Cincinnati, which is full of folks from the Appalacians, who brought their retro beliefs with them, the two fat belt metro areas, the Twin Cities and Milwaukee, and Indianapolis. Bush did better in 2004, in general, although not in the Philly metro area, and not much better in the Chicago area, and slid back a bit in the Twin Cities.

[McGavin999]

Phoenix is in Maricopa and Tucson is in Pima, Pinal is sort of between

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Thank you!

[Babu]

Pima County always goes pretty heavily Democrat. I don't know why--perhaps the influence of the U of A.

[Grampa Dave]

My wife feels that they would be good PAX shows.

[tubebender]

My Humboldt County is a sad statement. Only 2 small towns, Rio Dell and Fortuna carried Bush. Even Eureka has taken a sharp turn left. I fear the R's on the city council will be a minority after the next election. There have been a couple of big time Leftist move here and muscle into the policital activist consultant arena.

The Times-Standard carried the vote breakdown last week. I will try to post it.The Arcata council has a majority Green party make up...

[Dan from Michigan]

2000 and 2004 Michigan

LIVINGSTON COUNTY
Bush 44637 - 59.14% Bush 58854 - 62.79%
Gore 28780 - 38.13% Kerry 33980 - 36.26%
Difference - 15857, 24874

Livingston is between Flint and Ann Arbor, and between Detroit and Lansing. Fastest Growing county in the state.

LAPEER COUNTY Bush 20351 - 54.66% Bush 25555 - 57.89%
Gore 15749 - 42.30% Kerry 18084 - 40.97%
Difference - 4602, 7471

Lapeer is the exurbs of Flint to the West, and also of Oakland County to the South. Rapidly going Republican. Used to have a democrat state rep.

SHIAWASSEE COUNTY (Has a 20 year dem state rep till 98)
Bush 15816 - 49.09% Bush 19405 - 52.94%
Gore 15520 - 48.17% Kerry 16881 - 46.05%
Difference - 296, 2524

Shiawassee has a dem tradtion(20 year state rep), and has been a swing county the last few elections. I think that's starting to break our way. The dems couldn't win the open state rep seat in the last race. Between Lansing and Flint.

ST CLAIR COUNTY (Historic Ticket Splitters)
Bush 33571 - 49.00% Bush 42739 - 53.60%
Gore 33002 - 48.17% Kerry 36174 - 45.36%
Difference - 569, 6565

St Clair is North of Macomb. Port Huron is a core city there and leans dem, but the fast growing areas are more Republican.