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And a technical note on this piece:
@Nate_Cohn and I spent a lot of time trying to settle on how to define "the suburbs" to cut the Times/Siena polling data. And we learned something fascinating along the way... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/upshot/trump-suburban-voters.html
@Nate_Cohn and I spent a lot of time trying to settle on how to define "the suburbs" to cut the Times/Siena polling data. And we learned something fascinating along the way... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/upshot/trump-suburban-voters.html
Many of you know this is a hard problem, because lots of neighborhoods inside city limits are downright suburban, and entire American cities are in that sense more suburban than others.
@jedkolko has thought a lot about this: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-suburban-are-big-american-cities/
@jedkolko has thought a lot about this: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-suburban-are-big-american-cities/
So we tried a suggestion @jedkolko gave us, which is to split our data using both central city boundaries and this very cool newish AHS data derived by asking people to describe their own neighborhoods as urban/suburban/rural:
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/AHS-neighborhood-description-study-2017.html
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/AHS-neighborhood-description-study-2017.html
By doing this, we tried 4 categories:
-- Areas within central cities considered “urban” by the people who live there
-- Areas within central cities considered “suburban” by their residents
-- Urbanized areas outside central cities
-- Rural areas
-- Areas within central cities considered “urban” by the people who live there
-- Areas within central cities considered “suburban” by their residents
-- Urbanized areas outside central cities
-- Rural areas
And looking at our polling data, it turns out that people who live in suburban-style central-city neighborhoods are *identical* in their views to people who live in the actual suburbs. It’s uncanny.
Suburban-style city nabes: Biden, Trump 35
Actual suburbs: Biden 51, Trump 35
Suburban-style city nabes: Biden, Trump 35
Actual suburbs: Biden 51, Trump 35
Same on protests, policing
Suburban-style city nabes: 50% very favorable of BLM
Actual suburbs: 48% very favorable of BLM
Suburban-style city nabes: 40% very favorable of police
Actual suburbs: 42% very favorable of police
Suburban-style city nabes: 50% very favorable of BLM
Actual suburbs: 48% very favorable of BLM
Suburban-style city nabes: 40% very favorable of police
Actual suburbs: 42% very favorable of police
Suburban-style city nabes: 33% favorable of Trump’s handling of race relations
Actual suburbs: 31% favorable
Suburban-style city nabes: 26% favorable of Trump’s handling of protests
Actual suburbs: 27% favorable
Actual suburbs: 31% favorable
Suburban-style city nabes: 26% favorable of Trump’s handling of protests
Actual suburbs: 27% favorable
Because the inclusion of these suburban-style city nabes didn't meaningfully change the views we wanted to capture of "suburban voters," we ultimately didn't combine those groups for the sake of easy comprehension in our piece today. But...
I found it fascinating that on the election, and on issues about the police, race, bias against African-Americans, people in suburban-seeming city neighborhoods think a lot more like "suburbanites" than they do like city-dwellers.
now please proceed with arguing about our methodology...
