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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Trump needs suburban voters, but their needs shift

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Trump needs suburban voters, but their needs shift
Trump needs suburban voters, but their needs shift

[NFA] The Republican president's re-election bid may hinge on winning suburban voters who revolted against his party two years ago.

This report produced by Zachary Goelman.

America's suburbs were key to Donald Trump winning the presidency in 2016.

Two years later, they delivered Democrats a powerful majority in the House of Representatives.

But the battle over suburban voters in the 2020 presidential race is as much an argument about what suburbs symbolize versus what they really are.

The tracts of single-family homes sprung up in the 1950's were almost all white, and built around a male breadwinner and a female caretaker.

That vision seems to be what Donald Trump refers to when he tweets about his support among "suburban housewives," and pens newspaper editorials about protecting American's suburbs from federally subsidized low-income housing.

But in 2020, the suburbs are no longer a hub of stay-at-home moms. Today, many married women work, and fewer adult women are married.

Data from William Frey at the Brookings Institution show suburbia is more dense, more diverse, and less centered around a nuclear family.

These changes something even the president acknowledged on Tuesday (August 18).

"Thirty percent of the people living in suburbia are minority groups.

African-American, Hispanic-American, Asian-American.

They're minority groups." But then Trump added this: "They don't want to have their American dream fulfilled and then have a low-income housing project built right next to their house or in the neighborhood." Suggesting that a housing project - an image often negatively associated with poorer people of color and rising crime - was a menace to idyllic suburban life has a long history.

Trump: "The suburban housewife, women and men living in the suburbs, they want security and they want safety." But Reuters polling shows that white suburban Americans are far more worried about the economy and healthcare than crime.

And that means Trump's strategy could be at odds with a critical voting bloc he narrowly won in 2016 - and must win back to secure a second term.

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