Why are Exurbs so Republican ?

[Indy Texas]

These places are not "towns" or "cities" in any legitimate sense. They are places that were built whole-cloth by real estate developers sometimes as recently as a few years ago. They were not designed with Gemeinschaft or Gesellschaft in mind, but rather for a hypothetical person who would go from their attached garage to the office park several miles down the Interstate and back again, with occasional stops to run errands at the massive freeway-adjacent shopping centers that have a Costco, Target, Home Depot, Starbucks, Panera, and every other exurban comfort necessary.

No one is from these places. There was nothing there prior to the 1980s or so beyond maybe a few scattered people living truly rural lives on two lane gravel and asphalt roads. Usually the Exurban Creation story begins with a land-rich family, perhaps descended from large-scale farmers or (in the South) plantation owners. Changes in tax laws, fears of inflation, agricultural consolidation, and other macro trends lead the heirs to decide it's time to parcel up their ancestral lands and sell them off. Home builders come in and start paving cul-de-sacs and putting up McMansions. Shopping centers get built along the ever-widening highway. By the early '90s, a shopping mall is built. The county government loves how the value of their tax base is skyrocketing as disused farmland gets turned into improved residential and commercial lots. They want more, so they start dangling tax breaks in the direction of big corporations to entice Home Depot to open a new store, Walmart to open a distribution center, some white collar firms to relocate from their expensive, aging offices in downtown Dallas or Atlanta out to a new office park built exactly to their specifications and much closer to where their employees now live (all the better to encourage them to spend more time at the office!).

Why is this important, you ask?

Exurbs are different from similarly-sized "real" towns and cities in that there is no deep-rooted set of local grandees who form the social, economic and cultural elite and who, in midsize cities across the Northeast and Midwest, have historically been the backbone of the Moderate Pro-Business Country Club Establishment GOP.

In such places, you would have a stuffy old CEO of a Mittelstand-type manufacturing firm his family founded during the Gilded Age. He lives in a tasteful Tudor Revival mansion in the nice part of town by the golf course and the Episcopal church. He is a member of Rotary or the Masons or some other men's club. His wife is on the board of the local symphony and the local playhouse and hosts charity galas for the local hospital. His children went to the local public schools. He's invested in making sure his hometown is a good place to live, and has a sense of noblesse oblige toward it.

None of that exists in the postmodern exurb. There is no symphony or botanical garden because to the extent there are people wealthy enough to underwrite such things, they probably aren't going to stick around long enough to invest in that stuff anyway. If they go to church, they go to an independent evangelical megachurch off the Interstate that looks like a mall from the outside.

Public goods and public good do not exist to these people. They would rather pay $50,000 to have a private pool put in their backyard than have their property taxes go up a few hundred dollars to fund a public pool that everyone could use. And because their invented town is so new - the roads have just been paved, the school buildings are brand new - they have no need yet to make capital intensive public investments that would require raising taxes or issuing debt. They can, for the time being, have low taxes and good public services.

They don't need their state legislator or their congressman to get them funding to repair an old bridge or mitigate asbestos in an old school. They don't care what's in the farm bill because the farms got paved over years ago. So they can send do-nothing, bomb-throwing Tea Partiers like Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene to Washington because they don't need them to actually do anything other than engage in grievance politics.

[Indy Texas]

If you would like to get a better sense of the people who live in these kinds of places from a more "anthropological" perspective, I would recommend reading the book Tinsel.

It follows a group of Texans in the cookie-cutter white flight Dallas exurb of Frisco as they prepare to celebrate Christmas during the High Bush Era of the Late 2000s.