Democrats Add Suburbs to Their Growing Coalition

He said McCain's choice of Palin instead of a moderate such as former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge or Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) exacerbated Republican troubles with suburban voters in states including New Hampshire, despite Palin's attempt to bond with Granite State voters over moose-hunting and hockey. "At that point he narrowed his options," Bass said. "New Hampshire has the third-highest percentage of high-tech workers in the country, and high-tech people don't hunt moose."

Not all Republicans see trouble in Tuesday's numbers. Robert Clegg, a New Hampshire state senator who lost a primary bid for Congress this year, predicted that younger voters will become more Republican with age as they assume more responsibilities, and that Republicans will hold onto college-educated voters over the long term. "The more educated people are, the more they understand economics, the more they realize nothing in life is free," he said.

And as much as Davis worries about his party's future, he predicted that Democrats will have trouble holding onto suburban voters as Obama starts governing and tries to balance their interests and those of the party's urban base. Suburban voters in places such as Henrico, for instance, may not look kindly on Obama's tax increases on the wealthy, he said.

Obama "knows where his margins come from, and these folks have a different agenda than a suburban agenda," he said. "Any government has to make choices, and you start to disappoint groups in your coalition, and the Republicans can start picking up the pieces -- except right now, they're not prepared to do that."

Exit polls suggested that there are already some potential fissures within the Democratic coalition. Nearly a quarter of Obama voters said the government is already doing too much. Nearly half of them favor offshore oil drilling. And more than half described themselves as moderate or conservative.

But Schwartz, of suburban Philadelphia, is confident that the coalition is sustainable. Suburban voters have "identified with Democratic principles -- that the government should not intervene when it does not have to, but that we're not the enemy, that we're in this together. Republicans have tried to say government is the enemy, step aside, just me, me, me," she said. The trend "is growing, and it's going to continue."

Polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta and assistant polling analyst Kyle Dropp contributed to this report.