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NY Review of Books, SEPTEMBER 26, 2019 ISSUE
The Battle for the Suburbs
by Paul Starr
Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide
by Jonathan Rodden
Basic Books, 313 pp., $30.00
Cities dominate cultural life and the economy no less today than they
have for centuries. They are still the principal centers of intellectual
ferment, artistic creativity, and social innovation despite the
decentralizing potential of the Internet. In fact, while rural areas and
small towns have been stagnant and declining in recent decades, economic
growth has become even more concentrated in large cities that can
satisfy the demand for highly educated workers. If political power
simply followed economic dynamism, the surging metropolises of the
global economy—like cities at the heart of empires and nations in the
past—would now be the dominant force in government.
But the reality in the United States is exactly the opposite. As
Jonathan Rodden explains in Why Cities Lose, urban interests are
systemically underrepresented in state legislatures and Congress. With
Democrats clustered in cities, Republicans often win legislative
majorities despite losing the overall popular vote. Conservative parties
benefit from the same pattern in Great Britain, Canada, and Australia,
where the left’s vote is also concentrated in cities. There, too,
conservatives tend to win a larger share of legislative seats than of
votes, sometimes enough to form a government even though the main
opposition party has won more votes. The reasons why cities lose are
therefore often the reasons why the left loses too.
Democrats are painfully aware that they face institutional disadvantages
in American politics. Republicans have won the presidency in the
Electoral College twice in the past two decades despite losing the
popular vote. Since the Senate overrepresents rural, relatively
conservative states, it too now favors Republicans: “Democrats have won
more votes than Republicans in elections for eleven of the fifteen
Senates since 1990,” Rodden notes, “but they have only held a majority
of seats on six occasions.”
What is less widely understood is that Democrats also face a structural
disadvantage in the House of Representatives and many state
legislatures. In 2012, despite receiving 1.4 million more votes in House
races than Republicans, Democrats won only 45 percent of House seats;
that same year, Democratic candidates in Michigan received 54 percent of
the vote but only 46 percent of the seats in the Michigan house and 42
percent in the state senate. The conventional explanation for these and
other disparities is partisan gerrymandering, which unquestionably has
exacerbated the Democrats’ problems since 2010, when Republicans won
control of many state legislatures and then redrew district lines in
their own favor.
Rodden, a political scientist at Stanford, shows convincingly, however,
that Democrats would be at a disadvantage even if partisan
gerrymandering were abolished. Neutral computer simulations still tend
to give Democrats a smaller share of seats than Republicans would
receive with the same share of votes. The Democrats’ underlying problem,
he argues, results from two factors: an increased urban-rural divide in
voting and the use of single-member districts in US legislative
elections—the same method used in Great Britain and others of its former
colonies.
Although an urban-rural political divide exists today in many societies,
its effects depend on the system of representation—that is, the rules
for turning votes into seats. Under systems of proportional
representation, each party gets a share of seats in large multimember
districts in accordance with its share of votes, no matter where those
votes come from. The geography of partisan support matters a great deal,
however, in countries using single-member districts that are
winner-take-all: “Underrepresentation of the urban left in national
legislatures and governments,” Rodden writes, “has been a basic feature
of all industrialized countries that use winner-take-all elections.”
Electoral disadvantage does not necessarily mean defeat. Democrats were
able to win control of the House in 2018, when they received an overall
margin of more than 8 percent of the popular vote. Where those votes
came from was critical. Although Democrats increased their share of
votes everywhere, they already held nearly all urban districts, and
their improved showing in rural areas wasn’t enough to win many seats
there. What made the difference was a blue wave in the suburbs strong
enough to lift Democratic candidates to victory. As data from CityLab
show (see table below), nearly three quarters of the Democrats’ net
gains in the House (twenty-nine of forty seats) came in suburban
districts, and there was virtually no shift in districts that were
either “pure rural” or “pure urban.”
Table of changes in house districts won by democrats, 2016-2018
The striking contrast in the Democrats’ current share of seats from 14
percent in pure rural to 100 percent in pure urban districts highlights
a central theme of Rodden’s book: population density now predicts
partisanship. Indeed, partisan conflict is now so sharply polarized on
urban-rural lines that in state capitals as well as Congress, cities are
almost exclusively represented by Democrats; consequently, when
Republicans are in power, cities are usually shut out of political
influence. And since the Electoral College, representation in the
Senate, and the electoral system for the House and state legislatures
all disadvantage Democrats, the cities have lately been shut out very
frequently.
Why Cities Lose explains how urban underrepresentation developed
historically, how it varies from one region to another, and how it has
shaped politics in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and
Australia. Rodden’s analysis is particularly useful for understanding
the choices facing today’s urban-based parties of the left, including
the Democrats, as they try to overcome entrenched disadvantages.
In the United States, the emergence of a sharp urban-rural divide on a
national scale is comparatively recent, chiefly because of the
Democratic Party’s historical support in the South. As a coalition that
included rural white southerners as well as populist farmers in the
West, Democrats were stronger in rural areas than in cities in the late
1800s and early 1900s. By the 1930s, they had become an urban party in
the northern industrial states. But even after losing the white South to
the Republicans in presidential elections beginning in 1964, the party
held onto much of its rural base in Congress and state legislatures.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, many Democrats were able to keep getting
elected by distancing themselves from the national party. When Boston’s
Democratic congressman Tip O’Neill famously said “All politics is
local,” he was describing the politics that kept Democrats in the House
majority and made him Speaker from 1977 to 1987.
That era ended in the 1990s, when Republicans under Newt Gingrich
successfully “nationalized” congressional elections and gained control
of the House. By that time, the Democrats had become identified with
progressive positions not only on race and civil rights but also on such
issues as abortion and sexuality. “Voters’ preferences on these issues,”
Rodden notes, “are highly correlated with population density.” Rural
social conservatism is an old phenomenon; what is new is the sharp
polarization between the parties on cultural issues. Republicans, who
had been somewhat more pro-choice than Democrats in the 1970s, turned
entirely against abortion, while Democrats championed women’s equality
and LGBTQ rights. The more salient those social issues became in
elections, the more voters in urban and rural areas sorted themselves on
that basis into the two major parties. The urban-rural partisan divide,
long a phenomenon in the industrial states, had now become the principal
axis of partisan conflict throughout the country.
But the origins of the urban-rural political divide in the United
States, Britain, and the Commonwealth countries go back earlier. In
Rodden’s account, they lie in the industrializing cities of the
nineteenth century, which developed a characteristic political form that
has outlasted its original causes. To minimize transportation costs,
factories were located in the urban core in close proximity to water and
rail connections for shipping, while workers lived nearby in the dense,
cramped housing that was built for them. Suburbs for the more affluent
grew even before the advent of the automobile, but they were out of
reach for industrial workers.
The political geography of cities followed their economic geography.
Parties of the left—originally socialist and labor parties in many
countries, later the Democrats during the New Deal—organized workers in
the urban core, while conservative parties dominated areas further from
city centers. Remarkably, while the economies of cities have changed,
their political geography has persisted. When manufacturing departed,
the old neighborhoods filled up with the poor and minorities,
immigrants, and sometimes students and artists—and they too supported
the parties of the left.
The result is a paradoxical relationship of the left to industry and
industrial workers. Democratic votes today, Rodden shows, are
geographically correlated with manufacturing employment a century ago,
while Republican votes are correlated with contemporary manufacturing.
“Today,” he writes, “the Democrats are the party of urban,
postindustrial America, and the Republicans receive more votes in
exurban and rural places where manufacturing activity still takes place.”
States and metropolitan areas vary in their political geography,
depending mainly on their economic history. In some states that
developed a single major city in the industrial era—for example, Chicago
in Illinois—Democrats are mainly clustered in one large enclave, while
in states like Connecticut and Ohio that now have several postindustrial
cities of varying size, Democrats are more dispersed in a series of
clusters. In those postindustrial cities, the Republican vote rises
sharply as one moves out from the urban core; the Trump vote in 2016,
Rodden shows, rose from about 20 percent in the city centers to more
than 60 percent in the exurbs of Ohio and Pennsylvania. But in cities
that have become major hubs of the information economy such as Boston
and Seattle, the college-educated population is larger and spreads
beyond the city, and the falloff in the Democratic vote in the suburbs
is lower. The sprawling cities of the Southwest that developed in the
age of the automobile also have less of a contrast in voting between the
core and periphery, because they didn’t develop around an industrial
core. Despite these variations, Rodden writes, “American cities are, for
the most part, dense clusters of Democrats surrounded by sparser
Republicans.”
What disadvantages Democrats politically is not that they live in cities
but that they are so densely clustered in them. Cities are socially
diverse, but politically they are relatively homogeneous; Democrats run
up huge majorities in urban districts, “wasting” large numbers of votes.
Nonurban districts are more politically heterogeneous; even many rural
areas dominated by Republicans have Democratic islands such as college
towns and small cities. In Rodden’s words, both Democrats and
Republicans tend to “live among their own kind,” but there is an
“asymmetry to their segregation” at the geographic scale relevant for
state and congressional districts. Democrats are underrepresented in
legislatures because they are “inefficiently” concentrated in
politically homogeneous communities.
Republicans are overrepresented in legislatures in nearly all states,
except those that are already overwhelmingly Republican. The clearest
examples of that overrepresentation are Michigan, Ohio, Indiana,
Missouri, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Virginia, and North
Carolina—states where Republicans have had perennial majorities in the
state legislatures even though the two parties are closely matched in
statewide races. In all but two of these states, Rodden argues, the
Republicans would still have a geographic advantage without
gerrymandering; the exceptions are Ohio and North Carolina, where
Democrats are widely dispersed and Republicans have needed
gerrymandering to maintain control. In other states, Republicans have
been able to use gerrymandering to magnify the advantage that the
geographical distribution of Democratic votes already gives them.
Democrats have understandably made partisan gerrymandering a major
target of criticism; with the aid of sophisticated software, Republican
gerrymanders have reached unprecedented levels in the past decade.
Although the Supreme Court in late June refused to declare partisan
gerrymanders unconstitutional, it left the issue to the states. On the
basis of its state constitution, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court
overturned the Republican gerrymander in that state in time for the 2018
election. Independent redistricting commissions are a popular reform
with voters, and several states have instituted them, including Michigan
in 2018 in a referendum.
Rodden’s book is not an argument against such commissions but rather a
caution about how much they will be able to accomplish. Other countries
with British-style single-member, winner-take-all districts already have
nonpartisan redistricting, but their legislatures still underrepresent
urban-based parties of the left. Even in the unlikely event that
Democrats could legislate the creation of independent commissions for
all states, they would still win fewer seats than their share of votes.
What is to be done? Democrats have two options—one that is admittedly a
long shot, and another that is more practical but necessarily comes with
compromises.
The long shot is to try to get individual states, and perhaps ultimately
the US House, to adopt proportional representation. Change in electoral
methods is usually difficult for the obvious reason that the winning
parties typically don’t want to alter the rules that enable them to win.
In a two-party system, even the disadvantaged party has incumbents in
safe seats who benefit from the status quo. Since proportional
representation would likely help third parties, the two major parties’
leaders may share an interest in keeping the system the way it is.
Unsurprisingly, the support for proportional representation in countries
with winner-take-all elections has mainly come from third parties, such
as Britain’s Liberal Democrats and Canada’s New Democratic Party. Even
third parties that have advocated proportional representation do not
necessarily stick with it once they start winning. For example, the
Labour Party in Britain supported proportional representation until it
displaced the Liberals as one of the country’s two major parties in the
1920s, at which point it reneged. Still, a shift to proportional
representation is not impossible. New Zealand made the change in 1996 as
a result of a referendum. If the United States is to see any movement
toward proportional representation, it would most likely be through a
referendum at the state level.
The system that New Zealanders adopted is a hybrid form known as “mixed
member proportional representation,” in which voters cast one vote for
an individual candidate in a single-member district and a second for a
political party. The legislature then consists of the winners in
individual districts and at-large representatives from the parties
distributed among them to give each party its proportional share of
total seats. The system has long been used in Germany, where it is
called “personalized proportional representation” because it achieves
proportionality while preserving a valued feature of single-member
districts—the voters’ sense that they have a personal representative in
the legislature.
Since the mixed-member system preserves individual district elections,
it is less of a radical innovation for voters, and perhaps less
threatening to incumbents, than a system of proportional representation
drawn strictly from party lists. The Constitution does not require the
exclusive use of single-member districts for the House; the current
system is a matter of federal statute. Although any change in
congressional elections would require action by Congress, states could
adopt a different method for their legislatures. But as long as
Democrats and independents mistakenly see gerrymandering as the entire
problem, they are unlikely to give an unfamiliar alternative serious
consideration.
Since the road to proportional representation is at best a very long
one, the more immediate option for Democrats is to follow the same
strategy they used in 2018: pursuing gains in the suburbs. But a
strategy focused on the suburbs will come at a cost.
In a 1992 article in The Atlantic, the political analyst William
Schneider noted that, based on the census two years earlier,
suburbanites were about to become a majority of the US population for
the first time.1 Not only had the suburban vote been growing;
Republicans over the previous three decades had taken an increasing
share of it. The suburbanization of American politics, Schneider argued,
posed an enormous problem for Democrats. Suburbanites saw themselves as
property owners and taxpayers who not only bought private homes and
yards but also “bought” limited government. “To move to the suburbs,”
Schneider wrote, “is to express a preference for the private over the
public.” If Democrats were to win in the suburbs, they would have to
adjust their policies accordingly. From the 1990s until 2018, Democrats
were able to make some gains by nominating moderates, but Republicans
continued to dominate the suburbs and growing exurbs.
Some progressives have suggested that it is self-defeating for Democrats
to chase after affluent suburban districts. In June 2018 two
left-leaning historians, Lily Geismer and Matthew D. Lassiter, warned
Democrats that the strategy of nominating centrists in the suburbs had
yielded only “modest” results. Moreover, they argued, “turning moderate
and affluent suburbs blue” wasn’t worth the sacrifice of progressive
goals: “Democrats cannot cater to white swing voters in affluent suburbs
and also promote policies that fundamentally challenge income
inequality, exclusionary zoning, housing segregation, school inequality,
police brutality and mass incarceration.”2
If Democrats had followed that advice and decided that it was pointless
to nominate moderates who could win in the suburbs, they wouldn’t
control the House today. Geismer and Lassiter were right, however, about
the basic dilemma. If the Democratic Party depends on affluent suburban
districts, it will face limits on the legislation it can pass. But under
the existing electoral system, it has little choice. In countries with
proportional representation (and in statewide elections in the United
States), an additional vote in cities or rural areas is just as valuable
as an additional vote in the suburbs. But in congressional elections,
the votes that matter most are the ones in swing districts, which in the
United States are now nearly all in suburban areas.
The Democrats’ dependence on suburban votes is already constraining
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other House leaders. During the past several
months, the media’s spotlight has been on the four urban progressives
whom Pelosi calls “the Squad”—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar,
Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib. Trump has made them the subject of
venomous attacks and, he hopes, symbols of the Democratic Party. But the
Democratic caucus in the House has actually shifted toward the center
because of the addition of so many moderate suburban representatives.
Democratic leaders know that if they are to keep their majority in 2020,
they must protect those suburban moderates. As a result, they have kept
Medicare for All and other issues pushed by the House’s Progressive
Caucus from coming to the floor.
This kind of tension is typical of parties of the left in countries with
British-style elections. Such parties, Rodden argues, are often so
dominated by their urban representatives that “they find it difficult to
craft a platform that will allow them to win in the crucial suburban
constituencies.” If they depend on the suburbs to win a majority, they
have to keep the urban left in check.
One new factor, however, may help the Democrats. In an age of populist
reaction, the Republicans have moved farther from the center and are now
so beholden to their exurban and rural representatives that they are
running into troubles of their own in the suburbs. The center-right
Republicans who used to win in those districts have been disappearing.
By adopting the positions of social conservatives rooted in small-town
and rural America, Trump and his party have increased the opportunity
for Democrats to create a new center-left majority that brings together
the cities and suburbs.
Whether Democrats can sustain their suburban gains will be one of the
great questions of 2020. Even if they do, the geographic disadvantage
from excessively clustered urban votes won’t go away, and they ought to
look to more fundamental reforms than independent redistricting
commissions. Proportional representation isn’t yet an idea that most
reform-minded Americans have considered. Rodden’s Why Cities Lose should
start people talking about it.
1
The Suburban Century Begins,” The Atlantic, July 1992. ↩
2
“Turning Affluent Suburbs Blue Isn’t Worth the Cost,” The New York
Times, June 9, 2018. ↩
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