Where should the Democratic Party appeal to: NOVA or Youngstown, Ohio?

[RINO Tom]

1) Appealing to NOVA is significantly different than appealing to Orange County.

2) They should appeal to more than two places.  There should, ideally, be a very competitive Democratic Party, tailored to that area, in 40-45 states, no?

[RINO Tom]

Whether RINO Tom likes it or not, they will focus on places like GA-06 and VA-10 and not Ohio or Iowa.

They'll "focus" wherever they think they can win, but that isn't going to push them into a conservative economic platform to become, as you've so eloquently put it in the past, a "Fairfax County party."  They who most of their voters are, and their interests are diametrically opposed with a Democratic Party that becomes GOP lite on economic issues.

[RINO Tom]

Whether RINO Tom likes it or not, they will focus on places like GA-06 and VA-10 and not Ohio or Iowa.

They'll "focus" wherever they think they can win, but that isn't going to push them into a conservative economic platform to become, as you've so eloquently put it in the past, a "Fairfax County party."  They who most of their voters are, and their interests are diametrically opposed with a Democratic Party that becomes GOP lite on economic issues.

The thing is... I highly doubt that economic issues are all these voters care about (and even if that were the case, a good chunk of them would vote for Democrats). These places are also changing demographically and much more receptive to the Democratic message (whatever you think it is) than they would have been in 2010 or so. There's a reason why Jon Ossoff is likely to win the special election in GA. I'm not sure why many Republicans assume that places like GA-06 will trend Republican again once Trump is no longer on the ballot.

I'm also not saying that Democrats won't be competitive in statewide or even Senate races in many of these states like WI or MI or that all suburban areas are destined to trend Democratic, but IMO it's pretty clear that their future lies in the Sun Belt rather than the Rust Belt. And you can make fun of the term "Fairfax County party" for as long as you want, but the Democrats have been courting these voters for a long time now (although I agree that NoVA is not your "typical" suburban area).

Sorry, but I just don't really buy this whole thing.  Do rich White suburbanites not vote as Republican as they used to?  Sure.  But this myth of affluent Whites becoming big Democrats only seems to appear in the nerdy minds of our friends here at Atlas.  Most people think closer to the narrative of, "a rich billionaire Republican just won POTUS, what realignment?"  Let's use DuPage County, IL - a county that had voted Republican every election until 2008 - as an example.  It was 84.05% White in 2000 and onlly 77.8% White in 2010 (and less than that now).  If the GOP won 55% of Whites and 25% of minorities in 2000 (a totally legitimate guess for this county), they would have won the county 50.22%-49.79% in a two-way vote.  Given the margins, they clearly won north of 55% of Whites that election.  In 2008, with the exact same percent of Whites, McCain still would have lost the county 48.34%-51.66%.  There was also probably increased minority turnout.

Affluent, White suburban counties starting to vote Democratic does not necessarily mean that affluent White suburbanites are switching their voting habits, and to go with that analysis without digging into how the county has changed is lazy.  GA-06 going Democratic would almost CERTAINLY have more to do with it being more diverse than wealthy Whites - an incredibly natural Republican demographic, just as much in 2017 as ever - deciding one day that they are now Democrats.

[RINO Tom]

This is all speculation, really. No one knows what the party coalitions in 2040 will look like, so all we can do is make a random guess.

I personally doubt that states like Iowa will be more Democratic than New York in 2040, but whatever. Plus, I can't really imagine working class Whites being more Democratic than College educated Whites or affluent, upscale minorities by then, even though that's obviously what most Republicans on this forum want to happen.

But again, even if that's true (and it might be) in 2040, it will likely be a function of a college education being a more mainstream and "less impressive" accolade than it was in the 1980s and 1990s, when that group was solidly Republican.  Yet, the narrative on Atlas will be that a college education makes you more socially liberal or tolerant or enlightened or whatever, and those people are *turned off by the modern GOP*.  While that second part might play a factor, pure common sense mathematics will say that most of Democrats' "advantage" among college-educated Whites (if they even have one, which I'm oh-so-skeptical about) will be due to the fact that a heavily Democratic generation (Millenails) just happen to be much more likely than older, more Republican generations (Boomers) to have one in the first place.

If the generation below Millenials continues the trend of a college education more or less replacing a high school one in terms of necessity in the modern world and they grow up a Republican generation, the GOP will regain a big advantage among college educated voters...  Again, I'm not saying no college educated or affluent people don't vote Democratic because they're "repulsed" by the GOP, because they do ... but more of the educational divide can be explained by a generational divide, and that just seems like common sense to me; it's amazing it never gets talked about.  Additionally, Democrats are winning huge margins among college-educated minorities (funny enough, it's never talked about that college-educated minorities are always more Republican than non-college minorities, because what narrative could even be crafted by that?!  LOL), and that's going to continue to skew "college graduates" as a group toward the Democratic Party, but that won't be because of some shift among formally Republican college grads; it will be the group fundamentally changing its makeup with time.