The Affluent White Collar suburbs were once the bastion of the Republican Party. Since 1992 the Democratic Party has been dominant in the GOP’s former strongholds. In 2010, the Republicans riding the Tea Party wave made inroads back into the wealthy suburbs. Now Mitt Romney seeks to bring the suburbs back to the GOP. His challenge is convincing them that the Republican Party represents their interest.
Mitt Romney has long faced charges of lacking empathy, but, ironically, his greatest challenge in the campaign’s final months may be winning the voters who he most resembles: well-educated, white-collar white suburbanites.
Romney captured the GOP nomination largely on support from those voters—in places like Oakland County, Mich., the leafy Detroit suburb where he was reared (as he noted, with his awkward comment about his birth certificate).
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omney’s challenge in white-collar America underscores how thoroughly a “class inversion” has reshaped the electoral landscape. From the Depression into the 1970s, Republicans were the party of white-collar whites and Democrats the party of whites who worked with their hands. Every Democratic nominee from Adlai Stevenson through Jimmy Carter ran substantially better among noncollege than college-educated whites. But in his two victories, Bill Clinton did as well among college-educated as noncollege whites. In 2000, Al Gore ran 4 points better among those well-educated whites; the gap widened to 6 points for John Kerry in 2004 and to 7 for Obama. This year, a gaping class inversion runs through not only national measures like the NBC/WSJ poll but all of the recent Quinnipiac CBS/New York Timesswing-state polls.
Other measures find the same trend. As The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman and I have calculated, Ronald Reagan in 1984 won 82 of the 100 counties with the highest proportion of college graduates. But Democrats have taken at least half of those counties in every election since 1992; Obama captured 78 of them, receiving a resounding 62 percent of their combined votes.
Mitt Romney is the type of Republican who can appeal to these White Collar workers. He is one of them. Paul Ryan’s seriousness on economic and fiscal issues appeal to these voters. This is the first ticket since the Reagan era that is aimed squarely at these voters.
