Exit Music (For A Voter)

On Understanding Voters

What does the Canadian riding of Milton have in common with the Australian riding of Wentworth? What does the British riding of Putney have in common with Southlake, Texas? And what do these four places have to do with Democrats winning the Senate in January?

In some ways, the answer is nothing - the geographies themselves are all disparate, and different. Milton is Greater Toronto, closer to Hamilton than the city proper, while Wentworth is on one side of Sydney Harbour. Putney is in London proper, firmly in the "donut" of the city - Boris Johnson's Mayoral campaign victories were described as a donut strategy, designed to win the outer rings of the city - while Southlake is a little area between Dallas and Fort Worth. They're fairly different, in terms of the geographically, but they all have one commonality - they're running left, electorally, faster than a Top Chef contestant does at Whole Foods looking for the perfect ingredients. The reason why? It's not about the places, but the people.

Southlake, Putney, Milton, and Wentworth have all seen huge swings leftward in recent years - Milton and Putney, 20% swings between 2015 and 2019, Southlake has seen a 34% swing from 2012 to 2020, and Wentworth fell in a 2018 byelection to a moderate, but very climate-focused, independent (and, even in the notional Labor-Liberal battle, has swung from 68/32 to 60/40) after the retirement of Malcolm Turnbull. These places are all moving one way, and doing so for one reason - they're full of well-off white social liberals. Go to Georgia, and even if you see some amount of reversion from November to January in the wealthy white pockets of the Atlanta metro, the broader story of the runoffs is clear - it was white people who hold socially liberal views who swung Georgia from being a marginally red state in 2018 to a marginally blue one this year.

The biggest swing in the state, from 2018 to 2021, wasn't one of the diverse suburbs like Cobb or Gwinnett, or the Black belt, or even downtown Atlanta. It was Forsyth County, whites only until the 1990s. It was whites who have found their social liberalism who couldn't find their way to electing Stacey Abrams in 2018 that moved the most this year, and that's why Democrats have the Senate now.

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Click through some of this data that Lak has been putting out - a differential between an expected result in the US in 2020 based on 2016 and a range of other factors - and you'll see a pretty clear pattern. Almost everywhere that Biden ran substantially ahead of Lak's modelled expectation, the place was wealthy and white. Look at Texas, where Biden outran expectations in the DFW metro, or in Georgia, where the overrun was in places like Forsyth. I checked with Lak about a couple of hunches - Omaha and Denver - and you'll be shocked to find out that Biden overran expectations there too. What a fucking concept.

None of this should be revelatory, none of this should be difficult, none of this should be surprising. And, absolutely none of this should be considered exceptional. It's not, at all. White, well-off social liberals are no longer willing to vote for political parties that make people like me feel like second class citizens because of something we didn't choose and have no control over. That fundamental truth is knowable whether you live in the former home seat of the Deputy Leader of the Canadian Tories, the former seat of the Australian Prime Minister, or the former home of a LGBT Cabinet Minister in the UK, and it is true in the US too.

What Lak built is super interesting, but what it is, at its core - although, not intentionally - is a roadmap to where well-off white social liberals live. The places Biden did best in are areas full of money, people who would have previously taken lower taxes and ran with it, not even considering voting for a Democrat. In 2012, Southlake almost gave Mitt Romney 80% of the vote. Now, the next GOP nominee will be lucky to get much above 60%. That's the cost of a political strategy oriented on winning cultural conservatives in western Wisconsin or the Florida panhandle. But, that's the trade you make.

The GOP chose to trade losses in Southlake for gains in Youngstown, as the Australian right did in 2018 when they sacked Malcolm Turnbull for Scott Morrison. They traded Wentworth and Warringah for Bass and Braddon, Longman and Herbert. It worked in Australia, but that's because the left ran a campaign where they were antagonizing well-off white people (because they're not very good at this). It won't work in the US much longer, because there are so many more social liberals voting for the GOP than cultural conservatives voting Democratic. There's only so much more Democrats can lose in parts of the rural hinterland, and yet so much more they can gain in the white suburbs.

For all the talk that the suburbs could meaningfully revert, I'm not sure it can, because I don't get the argument for why voters turned off by the GOP's policies on abortion and marriage will find any more palatable in 2022 beliefs they found odious in 2018 or 2020. It's not about a reversion of geography, but a reversion of people - and I fundamentally do not understand why people who have decided that the GOP's social conservatism is a bridge too far are going to come back to the party whose singular achievement in office was to appoint Supreme Court justices who view my homosexuality as a mere "sexual preference."

Explain to me why my Romney-Clinton-Biden voter friend would ever vote for Trump or Hawley or DeSantis in 2024, a political party wedded as they are to a bigotry and ideology that views me as second class and undeserving of equality under the law. The answer to that, of course, is that he won't even fucking consider it. This is the fundamental truth we now see across the developed, English speaking world, and if you choose to be blind to it, you're just denying reality. You want to understand the suburban swing? Think about who actually lives there. Try and come up with an answer to why people who hold socially liberal views on homosexuality and gay marriage would vote for the party who appointed a Supreme Court justice last fucking year who claimed the greatest crisis of my life was a mere question of "sexual preference" and you'll see how nonsensical it all is.

The GOP are facing down the barrel of the exact same fucking problems of every right wing political party, and they're doing so ignorant of what they need to do to stem the bleeding. The GOP doesn't need a suburban strategy, they need to figure out what it will take for them to win back well-off white social liberals. They're not going to do it, because they're all in on a maximize cultural conservatives strategy, but that's why they're in danger, both in 2022 and moving forward. So long as they sing their current tune, all it will sound like is exit music - exit music for the voters who cannot trade social liberalism for a tax cut any longer.