Consider these six numbers: 62, 53, 54, 60, 60, 53.
Those numbers are the percentage of voters who supported Barack Obama last year in Westchester and Nassau Counties in New York, Bergen and Middlesex Counties in New Jersey, Fairfax County in Virginia, and Bucks County in Pennsylvania, respectively.
Now, here are the percentages of the vote that the top-of-the-ticket Democratic candidates got in each of those counties this year: 43, 48, 48, 44, 49, 45.
After Election Day 2009, Democrats attempted to minimize the ramifications of their losses by contending they were not a reflection on Obama or on the party’s image as a whole; they had the misfortune of running uniquely flawed candidates in Gov. Jon Corzine in New Jersey and gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds in Virginia — as well as, apparently, uniquely flawed candidates in the lieutenant governor’s race, the attorney general’s race, and six state-delegate races.
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But as the stack of 2009’s defeated Democrats piles up to include Westchester county executive Andrew Spano, Nassau county executive Tom Suozzi (probably), and state supreme court nominee Jack Panella in Pennsylvania, with a roughly proportional slide in the Democrats’ share of the vote, perhaps that party’s problems go well beyond the flaws of any individual candidate. Perhaps the suburbs of the northeast and Mid-Atlantic states are looking at the party and concluding, to adapt a recurring phrase from Obama’s days as a candidate, “This is not the Democratic party I knew.”
After 2008, the declarations were blunt: Obama won 50 percent of suburban voters, the most by a Democrat since exit polling began in 1972. Democrats benefited from increased turnout among young voters and African-Americans, but the suburban shift from Kerry’s modest 47 percent was the real sign that they were winning over skeptics.
Days before last year’s presidential election, the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University released an extensive poll, focusing on suburban voters, with a clear conclusion: “Against a backdrop of growing economic pain in suburbia, Barack Obama has surged past John McCain among suburban ‘swing’ voters who usually decide national elections,” wrote Lawrence C. Levy, the group’s executive director. With housing values plummeting, layoffs looming, and 401(k)s going down in flames, the nation’s worried suburbanites concluded that Barack Obama and the Democrats were the ones who could protect them in an increasingly volatile, frightening world.
All of this suburban success was a bit ironic for a candidate who declared as a younger man: “I’m not interested in the suburbs, the suburbs bore me,” and who famously characterized the “clinging” habits of small-town voters.
Almost a year later, the NCSS survey finds a dramatically different landscape: “After more than eight months in office, Obama is now fighting to maintain positive margins in the suburbs. . . . In the suburbs, opinion is split: 47 percent positive and 40 percent negative. One possible reason for Obama’s weakened rating is the increasing perception that the federal government’s actions in response to the economic crisis have hurt suburban families’ finances. Now, 31 percent of suburbanites say the government policies have hurt their finances, just about doubling from the Hofstra poll in October 2008. Forty-five percent say the policies will make no difference, down from 54 percent a year earlier. And one in five (19 percent) say the government policies will improve their family finances.” The survey also found an intense racial divide: Among African-American suburbanites, Obama’s job rating stands at 91 percent positive to 2 percent negative. For Hispanic suburbanites, it is 66 percent positive to 16 percent negative.
