In my first update, I examined political shifts around the country from 2020 to 2022. I concluded based on the evidence that Democrats made surprising gains during that period in predominantly White, suburban areas in the northern US—with the exception of the media market of New York City, where Democratic performance fell sharply, a likely result of that media market’s sensationalist coverage of increased crime in the wake of the pandemic.
But the aforementioned areas of Democratic gains in 2022 were only the most extreme examples. In these districts, Democratic candidates impressively overcame a 7%+ nationwide turnout shift toward Republicans. In other pockets of the country, Democrats also outperformed the national average, except by smaller margins. For example, some districts saw a 2 or 3% shift toward Republicans, indicating that, taking into account the GOP turnout advantage, Democrats had actually succeeded, on balance, in persuading voters to their side. Many of these areas appear to lie in or around major cities—with the exceptions, as previously noted, of New York City and Los Angeles.
Potentially helpful in illuminating why Democrats performed fairly well in these sprawling metro areas is the table below from Catalyst, which compiles statistical post-election reports by verifying voter data with publicly available voting records.
The data here may be surprising given how the national media has covered national elections involving Donald Trump. As you can see, Trump has actually made steady gains—3% each cycle—among Black voters from 2012 to 2020. Among Hispanic voters, he held steady in 2016—a shock to many pundits who assumed his rhetoric would alienate or offend that group—then made drastic gains (8%) with them in 2020.
Yet overall, Joe Biden in 2020 still improved on Hillary Clinton’s 2.1% popular vote margin in 2016. He defeated Trump by 4.5% and won the electoral college. This table shows us precisely why: Biden made significant gains with college-educated White voters compared to Clinton. Although he only improved by 1% among non-college Whites, his large gain of 4% among college Whites enabled a rounded 3% gain in the overall White voting share compared to Clinton, which proved decisive. In fact, this was the best performance of a Democratic candidate among White voters since 2008. Although the media has tended to emphasize Trump’s supposed appeal to White voters, the results in 2020 didn’t match that narrative.
The reasons for Trump’s worsening performance with college-educated Whites hardly need enumeration. Suffice to say, though, that he has repeatedly doubled down on populist rhetoric ostensibly designed to appeal to rural and less educated voters. This strategy worked for him in 2016: he improved among non-college Whites by a sizable 4% relative to Mitt Romney in 2012 and won the presidency. However, he wasn’t able to continue these gains with non-college Whites in 2020. Furthermore, their share of the electorate is gradually declining nationwide, meaning that Trump’s advantage with this demographic becomes less valuable with each successive election.
The question for Kamala Harris is, then, where can college-educated White voters be found in large numbers? After all, it stands to reason that, with Trump on the ballot once again, college Whites may continue their abandonment of the GOP. Big pockets of these voters may represent areas for potential continued growth for Harris, even relative to Biden in 2020.
The answer, as you would expect, is that college-educated Whites are most heavily represented in large suburban communities. Thus, if we locate these communities throughout the country, we should obtain a sense of which states are most fertile for Harris to make electoral gains. Most fertile of all, though, will be the states with large and growing suburban areas, since these are subject both to the aforementioned positive trends for Democrats among college-educated White voters and also to an increasing raw number of those voters, compounding the effect.
Where are these areas? Well, here are the national metro areas that grew most in population in 2021 and 2022 combined:
- Dallas-Forth Worth, TX
- Houston, TX
- Atlanta, GA
- Phoenix, AZ
- Orlando, FL
- Austin, TX
- Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL
- Charlotte, NC
Judging by our analysis so far, the states with these exploding suburban areas are likely to show recent heavy swings toward Democratic candidates. And indeed, Texas shifted 10 points leftward from 2012 to 2020, turning from deep red into…reddish purple. Georgia and Arizona, meanwhile, each shifted 9 points leftward during that window, both flipping blue in 2020—to Trump’s raging disbelief. (Florida hasn’t shifted leftward since 2012, but this is probably because its suburban growth is uniquely attributable to migrating retirees rather than, as in the other states, highly educated younger people relocating for job opportunities in sectors like tech.)
What about in the 2022 midterms? Did these areas, especially Atlanta and Phoenix, continue to swing left? Or did they revert somewhat rightward, potentially indicating that their dramatic blue shifts were related to election-specific issues like Trump’s handling of the pandemic in 2020 or his inflammatory immigration rhetoric in 2016?
Judging by the New York Times map of House district performance in 2022, we can see that it’s the former. As the screenshots above show, the Atlanta and Phoenix metro/suburban areas both shifted marginally rightward in 2022 but less so than the national shift of 7.2%, indicating that Democrats largely continued to succeed in persuading suburban voters (despite predictably losing ground overall due to a turnout disadvantage while their party held the Presidency). Accordingly, Democratic senate candidates in both states won reelection, a surprising result to some pundits who predicted a “red wave” given Biden’s unpopularity as President.
So it seems that, barring an unforeseen political shift from 2022 to 2024, Democrats can continue to expect gains in the still-growing suburbs of Atlanta and Phoenix. Whether these gains may be offset by other developments in Georgia and Arizona is a subject for another post.
For now, though, I’d like to return to something I deliberately skipped over before: the presence of Charlotte, NC on the list of rapidly burgeoning metro areas. It may be puzzling, given this ranking, that Democrats have not made major gains in North Carolina in the past decade. North Carolina, after all, has similar racial demographics to Georgia, with 60-65% of the electorate identifying as White and 20-30% identifying as Black. Yet Mitt Romney won the state by two points in 2012, and Trump still won by a point in 2020. Why this lack of improvement for Democrats?
Part of the answer is that much of the Charlotte metro area actually isn’t located in North Carolina. The city of Charlotte sits right on the border with South Carolina, meaning that several of its largest suburban communities, such as Fort Hill, are actually in South Carolina. Plus, Charlotte simply isn’t as massive as Atlanta or Phoenix and may therefore not be as ideal for exploding suburban growth. Consider that in the 2020 election, the percentage of Georgians who were classified as “suburban” voters was 61%. Whereas in North Carolina, it was only 40%. Unfortunately for Democrats, Charlotte has a smaller suburban sprawl than Atlanta or Phoenix—and its relatively small sprawl sits, to a large degree, in a neighboring state.
What democrats need in North Carolina, then, is for 1) a boom in population in the suburbs and 2) for those gains to take place in the suburbs actually located in North Carolina, not South Carolina. Since 2020, has this finally happened? Will North Carolina be this year’s Georgia/Arizona?
Let’s look at this map from the University of North Carolina, which demarcates population change by county from 2022 to 2023, the most recent data available. I’ve starred the state’s two biggest cities: Charlotte and Raleigh.
You’ll notice that the highest percentage increases in population don’t seem to be occurring in the two cities themselves. Instead, they’re occurring just outside the cities—in the suburban sprawl. In fact, some of the counties adjacent to Charlotte and Raleigh increased in population that year by a whopping 3%. Compounded over four years, that’s a ~13% increase in those suburban areas. For comparison, the average yearly population growth nationwide over the last decade has been about 0.5%, compounding to about a 2% gain over four years.
I won’t get too hasty with predictions. But if I were the GOP, those numbers—in a state with razor-thin margins over the past decade—would greatly concern me…
–Jim Andersen
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