Question about McLean, Virginia?

[Sol]

I assume this is just a precinct aggregation issue as others are saying, but if I had to imagine a place where a lot of Republican DC consultants, functionaries, etc. would live, it would be in McLean and Great Falls.

[Sol]

Honestly I think the people who are educated professionals who make in the 100k-200k range in our tax code kinda get screwed. It usually takes a large educational investment to achieve these jobs which are usually very demanding. People don't really feel sympathy for you because you're upper middle class, but you don't quite make enough to invest a significant amount in assetts, access financial loopholes. or start seriously achieving financial freedom. I'm a believer the tax rate shouldn't start sharply increasing until you get to the 500k/year range.

This reminds me of the flutter of discourse around Fleishman is in Trouble last year; there's a high amount of lifestyle angst that comes with being in that sort of income bracket, especially if you're a professional in a rich big city. It must be frustrating to see your money not go as far as it should, and to see your friends who make more able to do more things.

But just because that angst exists doesn't mean it's something we should be indulging. A person making $200,000 is well-off; it would take a series of extreme events for that advantage to be dislodged. Just because elite private colleges or summer homes are outside of someone's reach does not mean that they aren't rich. The class angst of upper-income professionals is does not negate their class privilege.

[Sol]

Another point to add is a lot of rich, white, educated suburbs in the south are resisting the trend due to high rates of evangelicalism in those communities. Especially if they’re not recently formed but long standing communities from the Bush era or before. Highland Park and University Park are examples of this.

I don't know if that's necessarily the best explanation for the voting patterns of places like Highland Park, Buckhead, East Memphis, etc. These areas are fairly evangelical but aren't generally hyper-evangelical in the way that southern outer suburbs and exurbs tend to be; the voters here skew mainline Protestant in my experience. Instead, imo, places like that are Republican, or at least less Democratic, because they're the homes of the traditional southern gentry.

The North section of Raleigh inside the Beltline is a good example; Democrats posted pretty paltry numbers here even in 2020, and Trump won a precinct near the Country Club in 2016. This area was where white people with money lived from the beginning, and because it's near the center of the city it remains desirable and has experienced little white flight (the fact that residential land use in most southern urban areas is generally suburban-type single family homes plays into this too). As a result, the area has seen fewer transplants and less development than demographically similar areas further outlying, which were built in an era where the affluent residents who moved in were new money, often from the north, and which have generally experienced more demographic churn.

This even shows up in language; the linguist Walt Wolfram, who teaches at NC State, pointed out in his book Talkin Tarheel that nonrhotic accents in inner Raleigh, unlike the rest of the state, are strongly associated with monied white speakers.

Durham is actually fairly unique for not having an area like this, because its rich areas are highly influenced by Duke University and so it has changed the particular local culture.

tl;dr: Basically these places are demographically more old school upper-crust southern than most of their metros, including newer and more outer suburbs.

[Sol]

If you're familiar with the groups in question, it seems sort of odd that urban Episcopalians or Methodists would really have common interests with suburban non-denominationals, but these groups together were voting solidly Republican long before rural Baptists did. I think you would really see a distinction if there were an abortion referendum. Perhaps the most representative politician of this social class is Kay Bailey Hutchison, who lives in a rich part of Dallas and who of course identified herself as pro-choice.

Because one of the most distinctive political characteristics of the South is opposition to abortion and because these people tend to have religious affiliations that are not recognizably Southern, it's tempting to characterize them as northern, but in fact people like this do not exist outside the South. The Gold Coast of Chicago does not vote Republican.

The fact that there aren't equivalents to this outside the South is interesting to me and I think is revealing as to the specifically southern character of these sorts of places. Chicago is one thing, but even cities of a comparable vintage and land use outside the south don't vote this way.