Question about McLean, Virginia?

[ProgressiveModerate]

McLean is a very wealthy suburb of DC with a median income above 200k, and relatively white for Fairfax County (65%).

According to DRA, McLean cast significantly fewer votes in the 2020 election compared to 2016, and also barely swung left despite being the type of community one would expect to swing hard left.



Is this just a discrepancy that has to do with how Fairfax County allocated mail votes in the 2020 election, or is there actually something going on under the surface here I'm missing (i.e. people fleeing en-masse during COVID).

[Oryxslayer]

When it comes to VA, it's usually safe to assume any discrepancy is because of Mail allocation.

[kwabbit]

A lot of very wealthy suburbs didn't swing that much from 2016 to 2020. By that I mean the richest towns in each state versus the more common UMC suburbs, which swung sharply left.

[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.

[ProgressiveModerate]

A lot of very wealthy suburbs didn't swing that much from 2016 to 2020. By that I mean the richest towns in each state versus the more common UMC suburbs, which swung sharply left.

Ye this is another underrated theme I've noticed. A lot of the "ultra-wealthy" suburban communities (meaning like 250k+ median incomes) swung left but not by much. The suburbs Biden saw the biggest swings in tedned to be either rapidly increasing in their non-white population, or sort of upper-middle-class white suburbs with 100k-200k median incomes (adjusted regionally)

Ig this makes sense because in modern day politics, most upper-middle-class 100k-200k/year jobs require high educational attainment which is favorable to Dems, but once you get to like 500k/year, your perspective may become more skewed into believing "well if I can achieve this, why can't others achieve even half or a quarter of my success". If you're making just 150k/year, you're basic needs are likely met but you're still close enough to understand how someone making just a bit less than you could struggle, and probably think you pay too much in taxes.

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.

I sort of suspect that a divide in our politics that is hard to quantify is effort:success ratio. People who achieve higher than expected success given the "effort" they put in are more likely to lean R, and the reverse leans D. For instance, someone who didn't do very well in HS and didn't go onto to college but by chance ends up making 150k/year is more likely to lean R than someone who went to college, got a PHD summa cum latte, and is only able to make 150k/year due to circumstances.

If you look at fields that tend to make pretty good money for not requiring many learned skills/education/trainings such as real-estate, they tend to lean very R, whereas jobs that require high educational attainment but don't pay that great like a lot of things in history, journalism, and the humanities, those fields lean very D.

[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.

[ReaganLimbaugh]

The super rich are Democrats now.

[TML]

The super rich are Democrats now.

Only those who are very well-educated are; those with relatively lower levels of education are still mostly R-leaning.

[Aurelius2]

I'm curious how Great Falls swung now. Pretty sure it's richer than McLean by a good margin.

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

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.

[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.

[Хahar 🤔]

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.

Of course this is anecdotal, but the people I know of who have office jobs in this income range (including myself) do not tend to find these jobs particularly demanding. Jobs like this overwhelmingly involve little to no physical exertion, tend to be relatively unstructured in terms of time (which, most significantly, makes childcare much easier), and disproportionately allow their holders to work from home. I spend most of my day browsing the Internet, and judging by how readily accessible my friends are, they seem to be doing the same thing.

I sort of suspect that a divide in our politics that is hard to quantify is effort:success ratio. People who achieve higher than expected success given the "effort" they put in are more likely to lean R, and the reverse leans D. For instance, someone who didn't do very well in HS and didn't go onto to college but by chance ends up making 150k/year is more likely to lean R than someone who went to college, got a PHD summa cum latte, and is only able to make 150k/year due to circumstances.

I have a moderately impressive-sounding postgraduate degree and a moderately impressive-sounding job. I did not get either of those things by working hard, because I certainly have not worked hard at anything at all since I became an adult. My point here is not to brag: I got to where I am not because of any positive characteristics of my own but because my parents endowed me with a great deal of cultural capital and also a great deal of actual capital. If I met someone without any college education who was making a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, my assumption would be that it took him far more effort to get to where he is than it did for me.

It is self-evidently true that educational attainment is correlated with voting Democratic, but explaining that in terms of "effort" is very much not the right way to contextualize this. If you want to actually understand people, you're going to have to rethink your own assumptions about moral virtue. The way you're putting it right now would be very insulting to the people you're trying to describe.

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.

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.

[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.

[k120]

I have a moderately impressive-sounding postgraduate degree and a moderately impressive-sounding job. I did not get either of those things by working hard, because I certainly have not worked hard at anything at all since I became an adult. My point here is not to brag: I got to where I am not because of any positive characteristics of my own but because my parents endowed me with a great deal of cultural capital and also a great deal of actual capital. If I met someone without any college education who was making a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, my assumption would be that it took him far more effort to get to where he is than it did for me.

If I met someone without any college education in that income range, I wouldn't make any assumptions about how much effort they put in. Almost everyone in my great-aunt's family is rich and non-college-educated (and, as you would expect, they all vote Republican). They probably didn't all get there through extraordinarily hard work. Like you, they got to where they are because their family endowed them with a great deal of capital. Because of that, they didn't have to go to college.

[Death of a Salesman]

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.

There were equivalents to this outside the South in the 20th century. Upper-crust Northern suburbs turned in overwhelmingly Republican majorities unfailingly from 1920-1960. Upper crust Northern areas with the density/ethnic composition of wealthy Southern areas were still voting Republican in 2014.

[Death of a Salesman]

Upper-crust section of Charlotte:
McCain+15, Biden+16, 89% white, 88% BA, average household income of $367k, 1400 people/km^2, 44% of whites have British/American ancestry.

This is not really comparable to the Gold Coast.