For all that President Trump has inspired his most ardent supporters to decry “elitism,” the Republican base has embraced an elitism of their own: utter and complete disdain for areas of the country they consider not Real America.
Cast off in the red bleed of the Republican Party in November’s elections were the suburbs. Not just the conservative suburban strongholds of California in Orange County, but in Dallas, Houston, Denver, and the Eastern seaboard. Of the 36 House seats Democrats picked up, 27 were suburban.
In a particularly resounding piece for National Review decrying the right’s disdain for cities, Kevin Williamson writes, “American conservatives have always been at their best when they speak to Americans’ aspirations. Alex P. Keaton — or, in the real world, William F. Buckley Jr. — never worried about being denounced as an ‘elitist.’ Ambition for advancement, and the wealth and status that comes with it, was until five minutes ago part and parcel of American conservatism. That was the best message American conservatives ever had: ‘Being rich and happy is awesome! Here’s how you can do it, too.'”
This message doesn’t just resonate in cosmopolitan America, but in the suburbs as well.
Six out of 10 rural Americans approve of Trump. The rest of the country primarily disapproves of him. For the Republicans content to sneer at them, consider that just one-fifth of the country is rural. 27 percent is urban, and the majority is suburban.
The Republican Party lucked out with a favorable Senate map and severely under-performed last month in House races. If conservatives think that they can bank on Trump running against a candidate as historically unpopular as Hillary Clinton in two years, they’d better guess again. Consolidating (read: shrinking) the Republican base to just rural support is a recipe for a 2020 wipeout, presumably against candidates more left-wing than we’ve seen in a century.
The distribution of the American population is only concentrating. While half of the country hasn’t recovered to pre-recession job levels, the top quintile of zip codes added 3.6 million jobs in the last decade. Although Hillary Clinton only won a fifth of the amount of counties that Trump did, Clinton territory accounts for two-thirds of our economic output.
Yet Trump’s most vocal supporters haven’t sounded the alarm yet on the GOP’s suburban and urban wipeout. Trump’s approval is anywhere between ten and 30 points underwater in the suburbs and 30 to 40 points underwater in cities. If Democrats run a candidate at all more likable than Hillary, not a terribly difficult prospect, and Trump doesn’t gain any extra supporters, Republicans can look forward to a blue tsunami come 2020.
So when conservatives like Williamson point out the simple fact that rural elitism is a recipe for electoral disaster, the proper response from Trump’s most obsessive acolytes is resoundingly, absolutely not “Meh.” The attitude that some Trump champions have adopted of dehumanizing city-dwellers and increasingly writing off the suburbs as loathsomely liberal is just as bad as coastal elitists lambasting flyover country. The country as a whole may not be as smart as we’d like, but even children know when they’re being spoken down to. Politicos on the Right can’t just think that they can write off 80 percent of the country and come off scot-free.
With our obviously superior ideas and ability to foster economic growth and innovation instead of burdensome regulation, Republicans can and should be the party of cities and suburbs. If we abandon that dream, not just in Chicago and Los Angeles, but in Newport Beach and Denver, we will lose, and we will deserve it.
