I understand your point about the margins and you're absolutely right, but Indiana's suburbs are the core of the GOP support there. Places like Carmel, Zionsville, Noblesville, and basically the rest of the counties around Indianapolis. Hamilton county is the third largest county by population and it is all suburban and one of the wealthiest counties in America. Sorry for the rant just wanted to clear that up. The rural areas are in a lot of cases less republican than the suburbs that surround Indy.
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Indianapolis did what Houston, Los Angeles, and Phoenix did, taking over the unincorporated areas of its county so that it would have what might otherwise have been the suburban tax base. Carmel, Zionsville, and Noblesville are very conservative in their voting. But go beyond the suburban ring of most other cities and you will find much the same thing. This is the land of the McMansions, of people who use square footage and acreage as a defense against he urban trends that they dread but are rich enough to do something about. Indianapolis has no big suburbs. South Bend has Mishawaka.
What would otherwise be a tangle of suburban governments with the attitude "$crew the central city"as surround Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Milwaukee are part of the city.
Add to this, what would be a suburban fringe of Indianapolis is fairly new. One of the distinctions between some urban areas is that some suburbs are old. Suburbs created just after World War II had new houses and new infrastructure both intended to last the lives of the people first buying them. Those suburbs still had some rural character -- but seventy years later that is gone. These places would be cheap to maintain for fifty years or so, after which time the infrastructure would begin to need huge overhauls -- and high taxes to support such. Furthermore many of the original houses have become decrepit, and some tracts of early tract houses have been demolished for apartment complexes. Put in apartments, and the traffic needs get very bad very fast and the schools get overcrowded. Voila! In come higher taxes.
If you don't want your aging suburb or suburb-like community to go bad, then you end up having to get accustomed to high taxes. Tolerance for high taxes may be the difference between rural and urban life, and some suburbs can be very urban in quality. Such is the difference between Noblesville, Indiana and Cicero, Illinois.
