The Collar Counties may lean Republican, but the margins began to decline with the rise of Clinton in the 90s because of social issues.
BTW: The same is true of Orange County, although it still leans Republican.
Oh geez...
OK first of all if this is all because of social issues why the hell is Clinton the guy who started the shift? Just four years earlier you had a far more socially liberal Democratic candidate who got destroyed. Actually the main reason why Clinton was far more popular was because he was much less liberal than Dukakis in regards to crime and "law and order" issues. His gun control laws might've been popular in suburbia, but Dukakis was basically the same in regards to gun control. Really what generally happened is suburbanites became less scared throughout the 90s.
And in fact the main reason why Clinton was so popular is basically the time, the economy was booming and while certain areas were hard hit despite all this (like tons of places affected by NAFTA), suburbia was not one of them. Clinton was called a "New Democrat" after all, and he wasn't seen as the type of Democrat who wanted to sell out the middle class to unions or tax them to death. And actually this brings up another big factor in the swing here: the realization that pre-Reagan tax rates were not coming back nor were the Democrats proposing this anymore.
But beyond all this, to look at individual candidates is kind of minor in comparison to the main reason for the shifts in these discussed areas, especially OC, demographics plain and simple. There's a reason Goldwater did better than McCain in OC, and it's not social issues. If the entire country had the same demographics in 1988 that it does today in fact, Dukakis would've won. As it is the suburban counties in question no longer were havens of white flight from people fleeing the scary minorities of the cities and gained many minorities themselves. You now have DuPage County as more than 20% non-white and OC is barely over 60% white. With demographics like that there is simply no way you are going to get the numbers those places got before the 90s.
all very true. But some of it is a change in the attitude of its white residents. Obama held McCain to around 56-57 percent of the white vote in Orange County and Obama got around 51 percent of the white vote in DuPage. Both would have been unheard of twenty years ago. One of my theories is that many of the hardcore conservatives in those areas died off and their children often moved away to the IE or to Will County.
One change in DuPage is that it became mostly built out by the mid 90's. As before the population relocating there from elsewhere in the suburbs is from Cook, but that population isn't from GOP Cook suburbs, but from areas that are mostly Dem. In previous decades even the Dems would tend to flip once they got to DuPage, since they associated the quality of life with the GOP leadership there. The heavier use of cable and the internet has diminished local news so that party association for local issues isn't made as it once was.
To the extent I can tell, most the outflow from DuPage goes to Kane and Kendall, and only Will to a lesser degree (generally NW Will). The migration patterns in Chicagoland still largely follow spokes from the Loop outward. This has been true for generations, and still seems to be the case.
