Reply #2: Redefine the suburbs [View All]

It might also be useful to consider how government funding and spending works in metro areas and the surrounding suburbs. Let me use Shreveport/Bossier as an example if I can. Shreveport is a city of about 200,000, and across the Red River is Bossier City of about 90,000. Shreveport is bigger, almost 50% African-American, has most of the jobs, most of the public facilities, most of the colleges, and needs tax money to pay for these services and buildings that people who live in Shreveport and people who live in Bossier but work or go to school in Shreveport use. Bossier is mostly white, richer, more Republican, has a better school system, higher property values, etc. Basically, Bossier is a suburb/exurban area and has the ability to generate lots of money because people are earning their money in the metro area and then making a home in the suburbs where taxes aren't as high because there aren't as many public services that you need to fund. The suburbs are nicer places to live, but they have a tendency to drain resources from the metro areas that fuel the local economy. I would assume the problem is even worse in metro areas of greater than 200,000.

Could this be part of the reason that suburbs and exurbans tend to be Republican? It is in the metro areas that the need for government intervention into the free market and wealth distribution - on some level other than city-wide - becomes really obvious. If we can address the way metro areas and the suburbs interact, maybe we can get more people to think of themselves as metropolitan. And as people begin to identify more with those heavily Dem areas, they just might become Dems themselves.