Republicans Are Out Of Touch With Urban And Suburban America

The GOP Is Simply Not A Contender In The Areas Where Most Americans Live

Raphael Warnock was more in touch with voters than Herschel Walker

As Herschel Walker headed for his second defeat in two months against Sen. Raphael Warnock in Georgia, he once again learned a key lesson of American politics: Land does not vote.

This fact was best exemplified in a moment captured from Fox News’ coverage of the runoff election, where Walker had a brief lead as results came in from rural Georgia and disgraced former Speaker of the House turned pundit Newt Gingrich expressed some optimism that Walker could pull out a victory. Then votes began coming in from the Atlanta region, obviously one of Georgia’s major population centers, and as Gingrich spoke, Warnock re-took the lead he would never relinquish.

The Georgia result echoed results across the country from the midterm election, even in states where Republicans did happen to win. The party cannot win cities or, increasingly, the suburbs around cities.

In the 21st century, this is where most Americans live. They do not live in rural America because the economy is no longer centered around farming and those industries. Of course rural America is important and vital, but there has been a shift away from those areas of America to cities, suburbs, and exurbs.

And Republicans can’t win there. These areas are not hotbeds of socialism, and in fact are largely centers of commerce and trade. New York City is the global center for finance and cities like Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and Miami are not exactly communist communes. So it isn’t that the cities are immediately turned off by the Republican Party’s historical closeness to enterprise and drawn to the more pro-labor Democratic Party.

But these regions do support the idea of an increasingly diverse and pluralistic America. In fact, this attitude towards the world is good for business. It isn’t just straight white families that purchase goods and services and the companies in these regions know that and cater to diversity not out of some sense of moral good, but just because it makes good business sense.

That stands in stark contrast to the Republican Party and the wider conservative movement, who, as the idea of what is “All-American” has continued to expand, has instead focused on contraction. Republicans steadfastly refuse to adapt to increasing American diversity, and it has left them out of touch with a majority of the country.

2020 Election Map: Land doesn’t vote

Look at the results from national presidential elections. The Republican Party has secured a popular vote plurality or majority exactly one time since 1988, in 2004. The party lost the popular vote in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020. Two out of the three presidential elections Republicans won in that time occurred only because of the electoral college, not out of the ability of the party and its candidates to appeal to most Americans.

Much is written over and over again by the mainstream media about the “struggles” of Democrats to win the rural vote, and Democrats themselves obsess over this fact to the exclusion of so many other issues and trends, but little is discussed about the GOP’s urban/suburban problem.

The right’s ongoing embrace of bigotry, championing slurs against Latinos, cheering on police violence against Blacks, mocking Asians over the pandemic, alleging that transgender people are child molesters, and on and on, is repellent to many Americans, especially those in the cities and suburbs. This shows a party that is out of touch with how millions of Americans live their lives. It’s an accepted idea that somehow ivory tower liberalism looks down on the “heartland,” but the reality of the right’s disdain for the bedrock values of “blue” America has yet to be fully explored or reported on in the same mind-numbing fashion.

We hear a lot about how rural diners don’t like Democrats, but little about why Republicans have no shot with patrons of urban barber shops.

I don’t expect the Republican Party to change course, even after losing election after election in these areas, even when they are successful at the top of the ticket. The party could leave behind its bigoted 19th century attitudes and embrace change and diversity while still holding on to its traditional conservative approach to issues like business, regulation, and foreign policy. But that would mean finally ridding itself of the bigots who have been so key to conservative success for decades. It would mean a modern emulation of the shift the Democratic Party went through in the 1960s, as it traded in the support of southern bigots for a more diverse set of voters, especially including Blacks who soon understood they were welcome in only one of the two major American parties — a profoundly sad statement.

Republicans continue to be addicted to the sugar high of bigotry, even as election results show that strategy as a loser. They can count on Democratic complacency to secure a win every now and then, combined with policies to suppress the vote that target the regions where most people live. That has sometimes worked in their favor and they continue to rig the court system to further make up for their lack of electoral power.

But the numbers do not lie. Republicans are not reaching urban and suburban America. They are out of touch.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Twitter @owillis/Mastodon: @owillis@mastodon.online

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