Après l’article du géographe Joel Kotkin dans le LA Times de dimanche – qui contrairement à ce qu’on lit partout estime que la flambée du prix de l’essence et la crise immobilière ne vont pas sonner le glas des “exurbs” – un papier d’AP relayé (entre autres) par le San Diego Union Tribune revient sur les efforts démocrates dans ces banlieues très excentrées, où G. W. Bush aurait acquis les voix qui firent la différence en 2004, notamment dans le “battleground state” qu’est l’Ohio.
“The exurb counties are going to be critical,” says Ed Helvy, chairman of the Democratic Party here in Delaware County. Four years ago, he says, John Kerry steered clear of such areas, “thought he could just grow the base and win the election and that didn’t happen.”
Nationwide, exurban areas – far-flung residential areas out beyond the traditional suburbs – grew about 31 percent during the 1990s, according to a Brookings Institution analysis. That’s twice the rate of their respective urban centers. Delaware County grew by two-thirds in that decade, according to the Census Bureau. Between 2000 and 2006, the county increased 43 percent.
A lire également un long article de Ross Douthat et Reihan Salam dans The National Review, où est posée une des équations centrales des élections de novembre: qui va emporter les classes moyennes supérieures? Extraits:
There was a time when this group was the backbone of the GOP. The correlation between rising education levels and rising Republican affiliation was once a constant in American politics: Except for the LBJ landslide, managers and professionals voted for the GOP ticket in every presidential election between 1952 and 1988. Well-educated voters in that era tended to identify with business rather than with government; they valued fiscal prudence over liberal extravagance, and social stability over rapid change; and they prized a suburban way of life that seemed threatened first by creeping statism and then by the left-wing radicalism of the 1960s.
But as America changed, so did the upper middle class, growing larger and steadily more liberal. The upheavals of the 1960s produced a generation raised in affluence but steeped in a radicalism that would diminish but not disappear with age. The causes of their youth — feminism, environmentalism, secularism, gay rights — became the orthodoxies of their adulthood, and the result was the rise of an upper-middle-class lifestyle politics defined by its rejection of mid-century social norms and its support for the new social order that the 1960s and 1970s had ushered in.
…
In upcoming decades, then, the GOP will increasingly be in a position with the upper middle class that the Democrats have been in with the working class since the Clinton era: It’s a demographic they don’t need to win outright, but one in which they can’t afford to get slaughtered on Election Day. Obviously there’s no imaginable future in which the Republican party wins over Bobo bastions like San Francisco and Cambridge, Mass. But if the national GOP wants to win 55 percent of the vote instead of 51 percent, and to compete in 50 states — as Nixon and Reagan did — rather than 35, it isn’t enough to reconstitute the Bush majority; it needs to be expanded as well.
Lauric Henneton
