Why Trump Is Losing White Suburban Women
Over the past few months, President Trump has framed the 2020 election as a defense of suburbia. In a Wall Street Journal column in August, he and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson promised to protect the suburbs from being transformed into “dysfunctional cities.” And in a tweet several days later, Trump warned that suburban women should be wary of Democrats, as they would allow crime to drift into suburban communities. More recently, the president has grown less subtle, imploring suburban women at his rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, last week to like him. “[C]an I ask you to do me a favor, suburban women? Will you please like me? Please. Please. I saved your damn neighborhood, OK?”
The suburbs, in Trump’s telling, are under siege — and a Joe Biden presidency would transform them beyond recognition. But it might be that Trump doesn’t actually recognize what suburbia looks like today.
Establishing what constitutes a “suburb” is hard; there is no single definition, and what’s more, in the past 40 years, the suburbs have become much more diverse. This is bad news for Trump, as his vision of suburbia seems largely stuck in the 1950s — a manicured lawn, a husband heading into the city to work at a white-collar job, and a “housewife” tending to the children and preparing dinner. Only this version of suburbia doesn’t really exist anymore.
It wasn’t that long ago, though, that Trump had an edge among suburban voters. In 2016, Trump won them, 47 percent to 45 percent, according to an analysis of validated voters by the Pew Research Center. But by 2018, 52 percent of suburban voters supported Democratic candidates for Congress, compared with 45 percent who supported Republican candidates. And according to our analysis of polling data from Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape, Trump is losing suburban voters to Biden, by 54 percent to 44 percent.
What is driving this move away from Trump and Republicans in the suburbs? According to our analysis of Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape data, beyond the diversification of the suburbs, it’s mostly because of white suburban women: 54 percent of them support Biden, while just 45 percent support Trump (very few are undecided).2 Meanwhile, white suburban men haven’t stopped backing Trump — he’s winning them 57 percent to 41 percent. (The reason we’re zooming in on white suburban voters is that nonwhite voters in the suburbs are much more likely to say they’ll back Biden — 83 percent of Black, 69 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander, and 57 percent of Hispanic likely voters said they supported Biden, according to our analysis.)
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-trump-is-losing-white-suburban-women/
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