After the 2000 election, political commentators began referring to the
Democrats as the "blues" and the Republicans as the "reds" -- terms
corresponding to the colors used on electoral maps to denote which states
each party's presidential ticket carried. So the question of America's
political future has become: Who will dominate, the blues or the reds?
The Republicans think it'll be the reds. They look at the 2000 electoral
map and see good things. For one thing, there's more red than blue, reflecting
the fact that Republican states tend to be physically larger. More important,
they figure that if they just hold the states they carried in 2000 -- which
basically means the Solid South, the Mountain States, the Border States,
and the more conservative Midwestern states -- their electoral vote
margin of four (271-267) will go up to 18 (278-260), due to reapportionment.
Then, for a safety margin, all they have to do is pick off a few of the
states they lost by less than 5 percent -- Oregon, New Mexico, Iowa,
Wisconsin, Washington, Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Maine -- and
they're home free.
That was Bush political guru Karl Rove's essential message in his now
infamous lost-and-accidentally-found PowerPoint presentation to a group
of California Republicans this past June. Stick with us, allow us to do
a little judicious pandering to workers in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania,
and the GOP's Reagan coalition -- albeit a bit slimmed down -- will
rise again. And, he might have added, we don't even need California, that
current bastion of blue America; we can build our red America without
it.
Republicans don't just rest their case on reapportionment. They think
that below the state level, the trends favor the GOP. They argue that
the pattern of growth within states favors the Republicans since formerly
rural counties on the fringes of metropolitan areas are growing the fastest
and these counties lean strongly Republican. Political analyst Michael
Barone called these fringe areas "edge counties" in his influential
"49 percent nation" article in The Almanac of American Politics
2002. David Brooks referred to these "fast-growing suburbs mostly
in the South and West" as "sprinkler cities" in his recent
cover article in The Weekly Standard, "Patio Man and the Sprawl
People," but his argument is basically the same as Barone's: Demographic
trends favor the Republicans.
Fortunately for the Democrats, these arguments don't hold up to scrutiny.
The Solid South is unlikely to remain solid; some of the mountain and
Midwestern states that are red are likely to go blue; and the blue states
that Al Gore carried by small margins in 2000 are likely to get harder,
not easier, for the Republicans to pick off. Moreover, and crucially,
growth trends within states favor the Democrats, not the Republicans.
As we argue in our new book, The Emerging Democratic Majority,
the reason for these trends is the emergence of a new American political
geography -- a geography intimately linked to the spread of a postindustrial
economy. Rove, Barone, and Brooks are missing the contours of this new
geography as they attempt to resuscitate a California -- less Reagan
coalition. They're living in the past; they don't see that the same changes
that have moved California into the Democratic column over the last decade
are moving most of the rest of the country in the same direction. Here's
how:
Democrats have been gaining strength in areas where the production of
ideas and services has either redefined or replaced an economy dependent
on manufacturing, agriculture, and resource extraction. Many of these
areas are in the North and West, but they are also in states like Florida
and Virginia. Republicans are strongest in areas where the transition
to postindustrial society has lagged. Many of these are in the Deep South
and Prairie States. As Democratic politics has evolved over the last decade,
it has increasingly reflected the socially liberal, fiscally moderate
priorities of these new areas -- what we call a politics of progressive
centrism. Republicans have continued to espouse an anti-government credo
closely identified with business and the religious right -- a politics
that plays well in parts of the Deep South but not in a new postindustrial
America.
This new postindustrial politics is not defined by states but by metropolitan
regions within states. These postindustrial metropolises, which we call
"ideopolises," are the breeding ground for the new Democratic
majority. Insofar as these areas are not confined to the Northeast, far
West, and upper Midwest but are found also in the South and Southwest,
the Democrats have a chance to build a large majority and to rewrite today's
political map. By 2008, Democrats could enjoy an electoral base of 332
electoral votes, many more than they need for a majority, while holding
a competitive position in a number of additional states that might swell
that majority.
The role of ideopolises. The transition to a postindustrial society
has transformed the economic geography of the country. After World War
II, industrial society was divided into three domains: the cities of offices
and manufacturing plants, where white ethnics, minorities, and immigrants
lived; suburbs, where many of the white middle class were moving; and
rural areas of farms, mines, and forests. Postindustrial society is organized
around metropolitan areas that include both suburbs and central cities.
The production of goods has moved out of the central city into the suburbs,
or even into semi-rural areas. And many ethnics and minorities have migrated
from the city to the suburbs. The sharpest contrast now is not between
city and suburb, but between the new metropolitan areas, taken as a whole,
and the rural countryside. The suburbs themselves have become extensions
of the city-demarcated artificially on maps -- rather than extensions
of the countryside housing city workers.
Some of the new postindustrial metropolitan areas like Silicon Valley
or the Boulder, Colo., metro area contain significant manufacturing facilities,
but it is manufacturing -- whether of pharmaceuticals or semiconductors -- that
consists in the application of complex ideas to physical objects. And
some of these metro areas specialize in producing what Joel Kotkin and
Ross C. DeVol call "soft technology" -- entertainment, media,
fashion, design, and advertising -- and in providing databases, legal
counsel, and other business services. New York City and Los Angeles are
both premier postindustrial metropolises that specialize in soft technology.
Most of these postindustrial metropolises also include a major university
or several major universities that funnel ideas and, more important, people
into the hard or soft technology industries. Boston's Route 128 feeds
off Harvard and MIT. Silicon Valley is closely linked to Stanford and
the University of California at Berkeley. Dane County's biomedical research
is tied to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. And all of them have
a flourishing service sector, with ethnic and vegetarian restaurants,
multimedia shopping malls, children's museums, book store-coffee shops,
and health clubs.
Professionals and technicians are heavily concentrated in the workforces
of these postindustrial metropolises. A quarter or so of the jobs in Austin,
Texas, Boston, San Francisco, or North Carolina's Research Triangle are
held by professionals and technicians. Plentiful, too, are low-level service
and information workers, including waiters, hospital orderlies, sales
clerks, janitors, and teachers' aides. Many of these jobs have been filled
by Hispanics and African-Americans, just as many of the high-professional
jobs have been filled by Asian immigrants. It's one reason that the workforces
in these areas we call ideopolises tend to be ethnically diverse and more
complex in their stratification (various combinations of employers, employees,
contract workers, temps, consultants, and the self-employed) than the
workforce of the older industrial city.
The ethos and mores of many of these new metropolitan areas tend to be
libertarian and bohemian because of the people they attract. Economists
Richard Florida and Gary Gates found a close correlation between the concentration
of gays and of the foreign-born and the concentration of high technology
and information technology within a metropolitan area. They also found
a high percentage of people who identified themselves as artists, musicians,
and craftspeople. Concluded Florida, "Diversity is a powerful force
in the value systems and choices of the new workforce, whose members want
to work for companies and live in communities that reflect their openness
and tolerance. The number one factor in choosing a place to live and work,
they say, is diversity. Talented people will not move to a place that
ostracizes certain groups."
The politics of these ideopolises emphasizes tolerance and openness.
It is defined by the professionals, many of whom were deeply shaped by
the social movements of the '60s. They worry about clean air and water,
and when the market fails to provide them, they call on government. They
favor civil rights and liberties and good government. They disdain the
intolerance and fundamentalism of the religious right. But they are also
leery of the old Democratic politics of "big government" and
large-scale social engineering. Some backed Ronald Reagan in 1980 and
1984, but since then, they and the places they have lived have moved steadily
into the Democratic column -- and in the meantime, they have reshaped
the Democratic Party in their own postindustrial image.
Metropolitan areas come in different stages and configurations. In the
San Francisco Bay area or the Chicago metro area, the work and culture
of the ideopolis pervades the entire metropolitan area. Many of the same
people, the same businesses, and the same coffee shops or book stores
can be found in the central city and in the suburbs. These are the most
advanced and integrated ideopolises. Many of these areas were once Republican
but have become extremely Democratic in their politics. Gore won Portland's
Multnomah County 64 percent to 28 percent. Princeton University's Mercer
County went for Gore 61 percent to 34 percent. Seattle's King County was
60 percent to 34 percent for Gore. Other metropolitan areas like Fresno,
Calif., or Muncie, Ind., have not yet made the transition to a postindustrial
economy. They lag in telecommunications, computers, and high-tech jobs.
In some of these areas, which are not yet ideopolises, Republicans continue
to have a strong following.
The Democrats' vote in the integrated ideopolises has included three
groups that loom large in the emerging Democratic majority: professionals,
women (especially single, working, and highly educated women), and minorities.
But it has also included relatively strong support from the white working
class -- white workers who have not graduated from a four-year college
and tend not to have credentialed jobs -- the very group whose defection
from the Democrats allowed conservative Republicans to build a majority.
In the most advanced ideopolises, the white working class seems to embrace
the same values as professionals and in some of them, white working-class
men vote with remarkable similarity to their female counterparts. As a
result, Republican appeals to hot-button issues such as race (or resentment
against immigrants), guns, and abortion have largely fallen on deaf ears,
and these voters have not only rejected Republican social conservatism
but also reverted to a preference for Democratic economics. In Seattle's
King County, white working-class voters backed Gore 50 percent to 42 percent.
In Portland's Multnomah County, it was by 71 percent to 24 percent. By
comparison, working-class whites nationwide supported Bush 57 percent
to 40 percent.
To gauge the effect of these ideopolises nationally, we looked at 263
counties that are part of metro areas that have the highest concentrations
of high-tech economic activity or contain a highly ranked research university.
Most of these areas used to be Republican and voted for Republican presidential
candidates in 1980 and 1984. In 1984, for instance, they went 55 percent
to 44 percent for Reagan. But in 2000, Gore garnered 54.6 percent of the
vote in these areas compared to 41.4 percent for Bush. And since Ralph
Nader got 3.3 percent in these counties, the total Democratic-leaning
vote in America's ideopolises can be reckoned at close to 58 percent.
By contrast, Democrats have continued to lose in rural areas in states
like Missouri and Pennsylvania and in many low-tech metropolitan areas
like Greenville, S.C., that have not made the postindustrial transition.
In all, Gore lost the non-ideopolis counties 52.9 percent to 43.6 percent.
Indeed, if you compare 1980, the beginning of the Reagan era, to today,
it is clear that almost all of the pro-Democratic change in the country
since then has been concentrated in America's ideopolis counties (see
chart, "The Presidential Vote in Ideopolis and Non-ideopolis Counties, 1980 v. 2000"). This is what has happened to the Reagan coalition: It
has vanished into the postindustrial economy.
Ideopolises v. edge counties and sprinkler cities. The changes
wrought by this new political geography can be readily seen by looking
at three states that voted Republican in the six presidential elections
from 1968 to 1988 -- California, Illinois, and New Jersey -- but are
now solidly Democratic.
California. In the Reagan era, the Los Angeles area in Southern
California, except for minority and Jewish enclaves, backed Republican
conservatives, while the Bay area in Northern California was divided between
Democratic-leaning San Francisco and the moderate Republicans of San Mateo,
Santa Clara, and Contra Costa counties. But in the '90s, the economic
and political differences between the Bay area and Los Angeles County
suddenly disappeared. The Bay area, of course, became the headquarters
for Silicon Valley and one of America's leading ideopolises. But Los Angeles
County also changed. In 1983, there had been almost twice as many aerospace
workers as workers in the motion picture industry. By 2000, there were
almost three times more workers employed in motion pictures than in aerospace.
It, too, became an ideopolis and, like the Bay area, began voting about
2-to-1 for Democrats. In the state as a whole, Gore in 2000 won the ideopolis
counties but lost the counties that had not yet been transformed by the
postindustrial economy. California's 14 ideopolis counties, which made
up 69 percent of the overall vote, supported Gore 57 percent to 38 percent,
while the 44 non-ideopolis counties supported Bush 49 percent to 46 percent.
Illinois. In 1972, Richard Nixon actually won Chicago and Cook
County, and Walter Mondale won the county by only 3 percent in 1984. But
Chicago and Cook County were making the transition to a postindustrial
metropolitan area. Between 1970 and 1997, Chicago lost 60 percent of its
manufacturing jobs. While Chicago still manufactured goods, what it made
was often high-technology computer equipment like modems or semiconductor
chips. According to a Humphrey Institute study, the Chicago metropolitan
area now has the highest number of high-tech jobs of any metropolitan
area. All in all, the hog butcher of the world now has twice as many professionals
and technicians in the metro area as production workers.
At the same time, Chicago and its suburbs began to move Democratic in
1988, but the most dramatic change came in the 1990s. In the 1992, 1996,
and 2000 elections, the Republicans never got more than 30 percent of
the vote in Cook County, and the Democratic total rose from 58 percent
in 1992 to 69 percent in 2000. With Cook County tallying about 40 percent
of the votes in the state, Bush in 2000 would have had to win 65 percent
outside of Cook County to carry Illinois. That's an insuperable obstacle
in a state that, even outside of Chicago and Cook County, is beginning
to trend Democratic. For example, Lake County, one of Chicago's "collar
counties" and part of the overall Chicago ideopolis, backed George
H.W. Bush against Michael Dukakis in 1988 64 percent to 36 percent; in
2000, it supported his son by just 50 percent to 48 percent, with 2 percent
going to Nader. In general, Illinois' ideopolis counties have gone from
about a 50-50 split in 1988 to a 59-39 Democratic margin in 2000, while
the Democratic disadvantage in the rest of the state -- a shrinking
share of the electorate -- has remained steady at about 7 percentage
points.
New Jersey. In the '80s, Reagan and Bush won the first and third
biggest counties, Bergen in the North and Middlesex in the center, by
comfortable margins. But in the 1990s, the central and northeastern sections
of the state became almost a continuous ideopolis. The state's largest
occupational group -- and fastest growing -- consists of professionals,
who make up 23.3 percent of the workforce compared to 15.4 percent nationally.
Counties like Bergen and Middlesex moved sharply Democratic. Bill Clinton
in 1996 and Gore in 2000 took the two counties by identical margins: 14
points in Bergen and 24 points in Middlesex. In Bergen County, Gore won
65 percent of college-educated white voters, including 77 percent of college-educated
white women. In the state, he won voters with postgraduate degrees (usually
a good indication of professionalism) by 62 percent to 34 percent. At
the same time, he won 88 percent of the black vote and 58 percent of the
Hispanic vote (which includes pro-Republican Cubans from Union City.)
But what of the Republican Solid South? The changes that have swept through
California, Illinois, and New Jersey are affecting politics there. Take
Florida, which the Republicans desperately need to keep in their column.
As Florida's high-tech and tourist centers have grown dramatically, they
have also moved sharply Democratic. For example, Orlando's Orange County,
once the center of Florida agriculture, has become a major entertainment
center and a home for computer services. Democrats lost Orange County
by 37 percent in 1988; in 2000, Gore won it by 2 points.
But the changes are not just in Orange County. As the table shows, since
1988, Democratic strength has dramatically increased in all five counties
of the state that added the most people during the last decade -- Fort
Lauderdale's Broward County, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Tampa's Hillsborough
County, as well as Orange County. It's not hard to see where Florida's
political future lies.
As the postindustrial economy grows, change is coming to the rest of
the South as well. As North Carolina has moved away from reliance on textiles
and tobacco, it has become more receptive to a progressive centrist politics.
All the state's postindustrial areas have become more Democratic since
1988. Dukakis lost Charlotte's Mecklenberg County 59 percent to 40 percent
in 1988, but Gore lost it only by 51 percent to 48 percent in 2000, even
though he did not campaign in the state (Clinton carried it by 3 points
in 1996). The Democrats' edge in Durham County in the Research Triangle
increased from 54 percent to 45 percent up to 63 percent to 35 percent
over the same time period. In the Raleigh metro area as a whole, Gore
edged Bush by a point, up from a 5 point Democratic deficit in 1988.
Virginia's premier postindustrial area, the Northern Virginia suburbs
of Washington, D.C., where AOL and many of the nation's telecommunications
firms are headquartered, has also been moving Democratic. Fairfax has
gone from a 61 percent to 38 percent Republican margin in 1988 to a 49
percent to 47 percent Bush margin in 2000, with 3 percent to Nader. Arlington
went from a 53 percent to 45 percent Democratic edge to a 60 percent to
34 percent Democratic advantage, with 5 percent to Nader, over the same
time period. If these suburban voters keep increasing their proportion
of the Virginia vote, and if they continue to trend Democratic, they could
very well tilt Virginia back to the Democrats, even in presidential elections.
Certainly, Democratic Gov. Mark Warner's recent victory suggests this
is a very real possibility.
But what about all those fast-growing edge counties and sprinkler cities
that Barone and Brooks write about? Won't the increasing weight of these
pro-Republican counties tilt these states and others back toward the Republicans?
That's not likely for two simple reasons. First, most of these counties
aren't very big (the 50 fastest growing average 109,000 in population),
so their high growth rates translate into only modest increases in actual
Republican voters. These modest increases pale in comparison to the additional
Democratic voters provided by populous metropolitan counties (the 50 largest
growing average 1.46 million) that had the largest increases in population.
Al Gore gained a 2.7 million vote advantage from the 50 largest growth
counties; George W. Bush gained only a 500,000 vote advantage from the
50 fastest growing counties.
Second, as these edge counties and sprinkler cities get bigger and become
more integrated into a metropolitan area, they typically become more Democratic
(call it the "ideopolis effect"). Combined with their relatively
small size, it means that even Brooks' and Barone's best-case counties
are unlikely to have the potent political effects they predict.
Take Loudon County in the Northern Virginia suburbs, the sixth-fastest
growing county in the country, cited by Brooks in his article. Even after
a decade of very fast growth, Loudon still has only about 170,000 inhabitants.
And, as Loudon has grown, it has become less Republican, going from a
66 percent to 33 percent Republican margin in 1988 to a much more modest
56 percent to 41 percent Republican advantage in 2000. The county's modest
size and its declining Republican edge mean it can't stop an area-wide
pro-Democratic trend (much less start a pro-Republican one): Even as Loudon
was growing like topsy, the Northern Virginia suburbs as a whole went
from a 20 point Democratic disadvantage to almost even over the same time
period.
Or take Douglas County, Colo., outside of Denver, the fastest growing
county in the country and lovingly cited by both Brooks and Barone. Douglas
still has only 176,000 inhabitants. And, while it went for Bush by 34
points in 2000, that's down from 42 points in 1988 and 60 points in 1984.
Reflecting these realities, Douglas' fast growth just hasn't been enough
to drive its metro area toward the Republicans. Instead, the Denver metro
area has gone from a 3 point Republican margin in 1988 to a 1 point Democratic
advantage in 2000.
And Loudon and Douglas are two of the larger, fast-growing counties.
The smaller ones, of course, have even less chance of impacting political
trends. Contrary to Barone and Brooks, edge counties/sprinkler cities
are clearly no antidote for trends in the nation's ideopolises -- not
in states that still lean Republican and certainly not in states that
lean or are solid Democratic.
The new political geography has a powerful logic that should lead, over
time, to a Democratic, not Republican, electoral majority. Of course,
demography is not destiny -- Democrats could fall back into the bad
habits of their past, while Republicans could move decisively to the center.
But barring unforeseen developments, the trends moving America toward
a postindustrial economy should favor Democrats in the decade to come.
