Democrats Add Suburbs to Their Growing Coalition

As crucial, exit polls from Tuesday's election show the Democrats sharply increasing their share of white, college-educated voters. Bush carried this group by 11 points, but Obama narrowed that deficit to four, continuing a trend away from the Republican Party by college-educated professionals that has been underway for at least a decade. Obama won white voters with post-graduate education by 10 points, up from a two-point margin for Kerry.

This shift went largely unnoted during much of the race, which focused instead on Obama's challenge in connecting with working-class "Reagan Democrats" in battleground states. Many Democrats worried that Obama would fare poorly with these voters after losing badly among them in the primaries against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the campaign of Sen. John McCain made an explicit bid to win them over.

The impact of these voters turned out to be far less than many had predicted. Some of the conservative Democrats who voted for Clinton in the primaries in states such as Pennsylvania and West Virginia voted for Bush in 2000 or 2004. So while McCain gained about a fifth of Clinton's voters in the Keystone State, higher than his rate nationally, he did not net that many new votes. In other places, such as Ohio's Mahoning Valley, Obama nearly matched Kerry's performance thanks in part to vigorous turnout efforts by union leaders.

The biggest region where McCain improved on Bush's numbers was the spine of Appalachia, running from Tennessee up to southwestern Pennsylvania, where he managed to flip some depressed steel counties. But these gains were in places that are, in many cases, losing population -- the electorate's share of white voters without a college education dropped by four percentage points this year, compared with 2004.

And McCain's gains were more than outweighed by his losses in growing metropolitan areas, suggesting that the story of the 2008 election was the Republicans' demographic weaknesses, not Obama's. In Pennsylvania, the southwestern counties of Washington, Fayette and Beaver gave McCain a net increase of 10,000 votes over Bush's 2004 performance, but he lost the Philadelphia suburb of Montgomery County by 41,000 more votes than Bush.

In Virginia, McCain slightly improved on Bush's performance in the rural southwest, but Prince William County alone gave Obama a 28,000 net gain over 2004.

"McCain did slightly better in southwest Virginia, but so what? You win Prince William and Loudoun, and you win Virginia," said Robert Lang, a demographer at Virginia Tech's Metropolitan Institute in Alexandria. "The Obama campaign clearly understands where the battleground of this election was. Do [the Republicans] have the basic math skills to sit with an Excel spreadsheet and figure out where the growth is, or are they out of their minds?"

He noted that a McCain adviser had referred to the parts of the state outside Northern Virginia as "real" Virginia. "If you're going to divide Virginia up, I'm going to take the one with more people," Lang said. "Did they not realize that for every one of these dying mill towns there was a languishing exurb that had suffered since the 2004 reelection of Bush, which in 2004 were all growing smartly and had house prices moving up?"

The narrowness of the Republican coalition was evident across the board. Ninety percent of McCain's supporters were white, according to exit polls. Obama attracted a significantly more diverse coalition: 61 percent white, 23 percent black, 11 percent Hispanic, 2 percent Asian, 3 percent "other." This is particularly significant, given that whites made up a smaller proportion of the electorate than at any point going back to the first exit polls; they were 74 percent of voters, down from 77 percent four years ago and a high of 90 percent in 1976.

Obama had a far broader generational coalition as well -- nearly a quarter of his voters were under 30, compared with 13 percent of McCain's. Obama beat McCain by better than 2 to 1 with them, far exceeding Bill Clinton's 19-point win in 1996. Obama won whites under 30 by 10 points, the first time a Democrat has picked up a majority of these voters going back to 1972.

To expand their coalition, Lang said, Republicans will need to find ways to talk about issues relevant to metropolitan areas. "You don't have to have the same policies as the Democrats, but you have to talk about this and not just talk about values in the small towns," he said.

Charles Bass, who lost his New Hampshire congressional seat in 2006 as that state turned more Democratic, said he and other moderate Republicans plan to do that at the Republican Main Street Partnership, a group that he heads. Suburban voters want a "family agenda, which is not abortion and gay marriage but drug-free schools and good public education," he said. "Tax cuts and gay marriage and Iraq don't sell as strongly in suburban areas -- it's education and health care and the economy."