WP, pg1: Democrats Add Suburbs to Their Growing Coalition

[DeepModem Mom]

Democrats Add Suburbs to Their Growing Coalition
By Alec MacGillis and Jon Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, November 6, 2008; A01

After President Bush's reelection in 2004, top strategist Karl Rove proclaimed the arrival of a permanent Republican majority. Just four years later, the results from Sen. Barack Obama's definitive victory suggest that the opposite may be underway.

The Democrats appear to have built a majority across a wide, and expanding, share of the electorate -- young voters, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities, and highly educated whites in growing metropolitan areas. The Republicans appear at the moment to be marginalized, hanging on to a coalition that may shrink with time -- older, working-class and rural white voters, increasingly concentrated in the Deep South, the Great Plains and Appalachia.

Nothing demonstrates this reversal as clearly as the Democrats' ascendance in the suburbs and among the moderate, college-educated voters who dominate them. Obama won 50 percent of suburban voters, three points higher than Sen. John F. Kerry's showing in 2004 and the most by a Democrat since exit polling began in 1972, swelling his margins in a number of battleground states....

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Bush prevailed in 2004 because he combined his rural base with just enough votes from the suburbs. But the Democrats have steadily been expanding from their urban base for the past decade. It is a shift that points to how the parties' basic messages have changed, with Republicans increasingly employing cultural themes that resonate most in rural areas -- such as Gov. Sarah Palin's appeals to "pro-America" small towns -- while Democrats have focused on suburban concerns such as education.

"This has been growing for years, and this election was a new leap forward," said Rep. Allyson Y. Schwartz (D), who represents suburban Philadelphia. Obama "was running a wave that came crashing down in the best way possible. Many of the suburban voters I represent see the Democrats as more open to ideas, more centrist, more pragmatic, not so rigidly ideological as the Republicans have become."...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/05/AR2008110504824_pf.html