The NPR Politics Podcast - Is The Suburban Swing To Biden A Political Realignment?

Episode Date: July 21, 2020

Joe Biden is winning in the suburbs. They were key to Democrats' winning the House in the 2018 midterms. But suburban voters were once a key part of the GOP coalition. Is the shift indicative of a bigger political realignment?This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, campaign correspondent Asma Khalid, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, this is Stephan out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. This quarantine has allowed me to tackle a lot of things on my honey-do list, one of which is building a canopy bed my wife has always longed for. This podcast was recorded at 1.29 p.m. on July 21st. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll still be enjoying the smell of sweet-cut mahogany. All right, here's the show. Sweet what?

Cut mahogany. That's very ambitious. He's cutting a canopy bed for his wife. That's quite amazing and impressive. Whoa. This is not Ikea. This is carpentry. Hey there.

It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm As'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the presidential campaign. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And today we are going to talk about the suburbs as I sit here in the suburbs. Joe Biden is at the top in national polls.

He seems to have a comfortable lead at this point. And I wanted us to dig in to where some of that advantage might be coming from and what the president is doing about it. So Mara, first, why should we be paying attention to the suburbs? Because 50% of voters live in the suburbs. That would be enough to win generally. Donald Trump won the suburbs in 2016, something like 49 to 45 against Hillary Clinton. And the old Republican coalition used to be white college-educated suburbanites plus evangelicals and rural white working class voters. Donald Trump put together that coalition by the skin of his teeth in 2016, but he broke it apart in 2018. White college educated suburbanites, particularly women, abandoned Donald Trump. And that is how

Democrats won the House. So the suburbs used to be kind of the core of the Republican coalition, but Donald Trump alienated them. And we will talk later about what he is doing to try to win those voters back. But first, Asma, you cover the Biden campaign. How is he speaking to this key voter demographic? Well, he seems to be winning them by most metrics. We should just point that out. I mean, our latest NPR PBS NewsHour Mayor's poll has Biden with a double digit lead among suburban voters. And that's pretty much in sync with every other poll out there. You know, in terms of what he's doing to win them over, I think it's really interesting because I wouldn't of his plans and policies certainly appeal to suburban voters, you know, whether that's his new plan to reopen schools, whether that's the plan that he's announcing later today around caregiving, child caregiving. You know, a lot of these things matter to folks in the suburbs, but I would argue they matter to folks in a lot of different communities.

The biggest thing I've heard from voters when you talk to them who live in the suburbs is about tone. A lot of folks are really turned off by how President Trump has both handled the pandemic, but also how he's handled the racial protests in the country. And I think what's so interesting is, you know, I've spoken to a number of white voters who talked to me about how much his conversation, discussion around racial issues has really turned them off. I don't know that Joe Biden really is doing much to win them over. It seems that many of them are being turned off by President Trump. But, you know, Asma, what you just said, that is a suburban strategy. Anytime you talk about education, free community college, public health, Anytime you talk about being a competent administrator of government, that's aimed toward the suburbs. And so many of the Trump voters who

found his behavior annoying but not disqualifying in 2016, now they're about whether they can send their kids to school safely, whether their mother in a nursing home is going to get COVID. All of a sudden, Donald Trump's behavior seems more disqualifying. And to this point, there's a woman I met in Michigan recently. Her name is Holly Gosa. She's a young mom in her 30s. And she herself is white. But she talked about the fact of how much some of these other issues around, you know, whether it's racial justice or immigrant rights, matter to her. You know, we've seen things within the LGBTQ community. We've seen things with DACA and just those big issues

that I feel like we were starting to make progress towards seeing some changes and really being inclusive to all people and some of those things being rolled back or stopped. And what she's saying is so in sync with what I heard from suburban voters in 2018 as well, which is a lot of the issues that Donald Trump has focused on, particularly as it often relates to race, has alienated white women in the suburbs. Well, and the demographics of the suburbs are a big part of this story. The suburbs are not what they used to be.

No, the suburbs are no longer just white. They're more diverse. They certainly are. They've always been educated, but that's part of it. There's something I think called a modernization cycle that sociologists talk about, that as suburbs around a major metropolitan area get more diverse, and maybe there are certain industries that need educated workers, whether it's digital companies or healthcare companies, that makes the suburbs more blue because the kinds

of values that they have, they're tolerant of immigration. They believe in higher education. All those things just make the suburbs a more fertile field for Democrats. All right. We are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, President Trump's pitch to the suburban voters. Don't miss the national conversation with me, Jen White, every weekday on NPR's 1A. News, views, and insight for the relentlessly curious. A space for those willing to share what they know and ready to hear the other side of the story. Subscribe to 1A now and leave a review.

And we're back. And I want to talk about the president's strategy here. In about the last week or so, he has really amped up his pitch to suburban voters. And it is not the least bit subtle. They want to destroy our suburbs. That is his message. Democrats want to destroy your suburbs, hurt your home values and change your way of life. It's a pretty direct message. And Tam, you've been, I know, reporting on this and what exactly the president is thinking in doing this. So walk us through this. I mean, I think it's a it is a controversial statement, to say the least. Yeah, well, OK, so first off, as we've mentioned, he's not winning the suburbs right now. And what is his problem with the suburbs?

It's the problem that he has all over the place, which is that people are very concerned about the coronavirus. They're worried about sending their kids back to school safely. His ratings on all of these things are really terrible. And so the president is doing what he does and what he did on the eve of the 2018 midterms as well with a different thing to be scared of. But he's basically saying, be afraid, be very afraid. The other side is scary and it's going to hurt your way of life. And so the Trump campaign has spent just this month alone, $18 million on TV spots, hitting variations on that

theme that Joe Biden wants to defund the police, which is not true, and that that will make you unsafe. This figure comes from the firm Ad Analytics. And the newest ad came out yesterday, started running yesterday. It's called Break In. And it features an older white woman who sees an intruder and calls 911. Hello, you've reached 911. I'm sorry that there is no one here to answer your emergency call. But no one is there to answer. Oh, I've seen this ad.

Yeah. It's all aimed at the suburbs. And it's all aimed at getting people to start worrying about something that is not what they're worrying about now. What they're worrying about now is the pandemic and the recession. And he wants to try to change the subject. But Mara, what you're describing to me is sort of, it's funny, I guess, because it's not actually aimed at a realistic view of what a suburban community looks like, right? It's aimed at this anachronistic view of a largely white suburban community.

I was looking through some stuff that The Upshot, you know, the New York Times did recently, and they said that it's actually only 5% of white residents who live in an exclusively white census tract anymore. I mean, that's crazy that he's messaging, it seems, to a largely white community when that is not the way that even most white folks live anymore. Okay, so here's my question, though. In 2016, he won the suburbs. It was by, like, two points, but President Trump won the suburbs. What worked then that is not working now?

What's changed? Hillary Clinton. That is what changed. Here's what Paul Ryan, who was the vice presidential candidate with Mitt Romney, recently was at a retreat put on by Mitt Romney's son. This was reported in The New York Times, where he talked about Trump losing the suburbs. And back then, he also pointed out a very interesting difference between then and now, which is back then voters who didn't like Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump broke two thirds for Donald Trump.

This time, voters who don't like Joe Biden or Donald Trump are breaking for Biden by almost the exact same percentage. So the big difference is Hillary Clinton. And I don't think that Donald Trump had a specific suburban message last time. What he did do, though, is goose the turnout among white rural voters, white non-college voters in places that were outside of the suburbs to such high numbers. That's what put him over the finish line. Yes, he won the suburbs by a couple of points. He did not get a majority. I mean, I think that that's true, Mara. I was going to say, don't you think, though, also there was that there has been some shift among folks who were willing to give Donald Trump a chance? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. third party. Absolutely. Who just said now, and whether this is the pandemic, I hear a lot about the pandemic,

but there seems to be something tangible that they say they can just better understand his presidency than where they were a couple of years ago, right? And these are largely college educated voters. Yeah, he was the change candidate. If you were unhappy with the system and it wasn't working for you, let's take a flyer on a new guy. He's a businessman. He's different. You know, they took a chance on him. They gave him a chance and now they saw how he governed and they don't like it. There's no doubt about that. Donald Trump is the incumbent now. Joe Biden, hard to believe this, is the change candidate. I mean, he's only been around for 45 years, but he is the change. Yeah, so I talked to a political scientist named Ernest McGowan at the University of Richmond.

And he's an expert in the suburbs. His research is around African Americans who live in the suburbs. He is also a suburban resident. And I was talking to him about this. And he was like, well, what is a suburb really anyway? Is it a geography or is it a state of mind? And if it's an identity that, you know, like the an identity of a certain level of success, but not excess of, you know, you're going to get your kids in good schools, you will have a lawnmower, it's a state of mind. Well, then he says that, you know, the places that were suburbs before are almost part of the city now. What we're calling a suburb now is going to be part of the metro in a few years. And what we're calling exurbs is going to actually be the suburbs as we would know them. And, you know, don't forget what we saw in 2018, that if you live in the Houston suburbs or

the Philadelphia suburbs, you voted the same way. In other words, all those suburban areas, even in red states, went to the Democrats. Geography didn't seem to matter. It was if you live in a metro area, including suburbs, you started to turn blue. We're going to leave it there for today, but you can continue the conversation in our Facebook group. Just go to n.pr slash politics group

and request to join. It's a place to meet other fans of the pod and to talk about what you heard on the show and lots of other stuff, too. The link is also in the description of this episode. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the presidential campaign. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. © BF-WATCH TV 2021