Why are Exurbs so Republican ?

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

The only place that can be considered more right-wing than rural areas tend to be exurban areas which outside of the south tend to be even more right-wing than rural areas.

Why is this the case ?

[Del Tachi]

They are more White than a lot of rural areas, for starters

[WindowPhil]

They are more White than a lot of rural areas, for starters

They're also richer, which is an important factor (and not just on fiscal policy).

Rural areas may not be politically correct. But in my observation, I've concluded the people there are more likely than those in exurbs to swear like sailors, engage in premarital sex, and do drugs. If there's less wealth, there's more of an uncertainty how things will go, which leads to a sort of carelessness I guess.

[TML]

Suburbs have trended Democratic because these areas have become more diverse. This is not yet the case for most exurbs, which continue to be whiter than most urban/suburban areas. However, given that exurbs also have many voters with higher education, they could be next in line to flip D within the next generation, especially if Republicans continue to stick with Trumpism.

[WindowPhil]

Suburbs have trended Democratic because these areas have become more diverse. This is not yet the case for most exurbs, which continue to be whiter than most urban/suburban areas. However, given that exurbs also have many voters with higher education, they could be next in line to flip D within the next generation, especially if Republicans continue to stick with Trumpism.

As someone who's trapped in an exurb because they're saving up money to move out of their parents house after college, I can tell you that the prototypical Exurban voter has a way different philosophical profile than a Suburban one.

* The people there don't tend to be Mainline Protestants or "Cafeteria Catholics", but instead white Conservative Evangelicals who attend Non-Denominational megachurches and white Conservative Catholics.

* Many people who are participants of this wave of Exurban Flight are those who came of age between 1980 and 1994. The "Family Ties Years" when conservatism took hold of the (mostly white of that era's) youth and gave way to lifelong ardent patterns of high conservatism and conservative religiosity. If the exurbs have a huge concentration of these people, they pass it down to their children and the echo chamber continues. Imagine Homeschoolers, families with Internet filters to keep out "worldly sites", and a fear of marijuana due to Reagan-era messaging. That's my mental stereotype of the exurbs.

The only hope I'd say that there is of flipping them is if a Black and POC upper middle class develops and the Exurbs diversify. Although perhaps there would be an issue of not wanting to move to an area with the "Racist Exurbanites" and that doesn't materialize.

[Pink Panther]

One reason why Exurbs are much more GOP than Suburbs is due to many right-wingers moving to the Exurbs, except for Suburbs, since they want to get away from the core city/cities as much as possible, while also being able to travel for work, usually in an urban core. Suburbs used to serve this goal, but due to more urbanization in Suburbia, exurbs are now being populated by these right-wingers.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Outside of some that has a large non-white population (usually a case of that town developing before the suburbs did and getting swallowed up by sprawl) and that have notable colleges and serve as a college town of sorts as well (like Denton, TX), there's basically zero demographic reason for them to vote D. They're predominantly white, usually not that college educated since they attract a lot of commuters to more blue collar jobs and the local jobs also tend to be less college education-based and don't have a cosmopolitan sort of aesthetic that liberals find appealing. Also they're very car-based and terrible places if you want to be car free or at least minimize their use, which is rare for non-liberals.

[mileslunn]

Not sure I would agree exurbs more Republican than rural areas.  That was true under Obama, but in 2020, yes most went Republican but not by same lopsided margins you saw in many rural areas.  More importantly, Trump generally did worse than Romney in most exurbs while much better than him in most rural areas.

Main reason is they are still very white.  Also population density is another factor.  If you plot vote vs. population density, correlation is very strong and seems to be getting stronger each election.  Suburbs typically have population densities over 500 people per square mile, while Exurbs are usually between 200 to 500 people per square mile which is higher than most rural areas although in Northeast you do have many rural areas that high and looking abroad, that is the typical density of a rural constituency in England. 

Also form of transportation another big factor.  People who drive cars to work more likely to vote GOP than those who take public transit and generally suburbs well served by public transit while exurbs are not.  Likewise social circles a big thing and since exurbs so far out, most who live in them may commute into work in city but spend very little time there otherwise and few in social circles live there.  By contrast those in suburbs more likely to go into city more often and have members from social circle who live there thus impacted.

[Geoffrey Howe]

Much of exurbia (I believe) is now what much of suburbia used to be like as the latter has become more dense. It attracts a bunch similar to suburbans of fifty years ago - but with a more blue-collar appeal which in 2020 means it is more Republican.

[Obama-Biden Democrat]

Round 2 of white flight. White suburbanites left the big cities in the 1960's to the suburbs, which were almost universally white. Now with demographic changes, the suburbs are filled with minorities so whites are fleeing to farther out exurbs.

A good example is Atlanta with Cobb and Gwinnett being long time GOP suburban strongholds that have now flipped. You would have to move to a exurban county like Forsyth.

[Benjamin Frank]

Much of exurbia (I believe) is now what much of suburbia used to be like as the latter has become more dense. It attracts a bunch similar to suburbans of fifty years ago - but with a more blue-collar appeal which in 2020 means it is more Republican.

Yes, as an economic historian I teach on this in my high school class (though not this political angle.)

Suburbs grew significantly post World War II based on several factors: the greater speed of cars vs. prior which allowed for longer commutes and the construction of roads and highways for new suburban subdivisions, GI loans from the federal government and the Federal Housing Administration that gave subsidies to developers to build these new suburban subdivisions (mostly restricted to white people.)

The majority of people that moved into these areas were young parents with large families as for the same price of renting an apartment in the city, they could get a loan for a house in a suburb.  Gasoline was also very cheap at the time.

Most young parents who already have large families are religious and social conservatives.

This isn't to say that all religious social conservatives at that time voted for the conservative party.

However, by the late 1950s the general rule was that big cities were largely Democratic, suburbs were heavily Republican and smaller cities, towns and rural areas were the swing vote areas.

The exurbs of today are basically the same as the suburbs of the 1950s.

[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.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

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.

Thanks this is very interesting, it's funny that MTG is a carpetbagger from her exurban area since it got way too dense and is now repsenented by a democrat. I'm just curious just how connected to an urban area the exurbs are ?. There must be some sort of semi-regular commuting but i can't imagine it's frequent given the lenght of time required .I'll check out the book you recommneded.

Also it seems like the Nova and Bay Are exurbs are still pretty blue, do they fit within the same pattern or are they somehow different ?

[WindowPhil]

I'm just curious just how connected to an urban area the exurbs are ?. There must be some sort of semi-regular commuting but i can't imagine it's frequent given the lenght of time required .I'll check out the book you recommneded.
[/quote]

"I don't like the city. I grew up a few minute drive from it. But the only reason I go into the city is for work and because my job is downtown. Or to watch a Baseball game. Say, I heard on Sean Hannity's radio show that the MLB changed their twitter logo to the rainbow pride colors. It's absolutely ridiculous. There are children watching baseball games. But children like my son need to man up. He's not listening to good music anymore. I tried showing him some led zeppelin and some Bon Jovi but he tells me that they're lame. The liberal elite brainwashed him. I really wish the Sunday paper had parenting tips in it. Maybe they should replace the funnies with some tips for how to be a better parent. I hope my son never comes out as transgender. All my friends would make fun of me, and I've known them all since kindergarten. We grew up together. America needs to be taken back from those liberals in the city, I had to move to greener pastures all because they want to take away our freedom."