The Democrats have become the party of the super-rich—tech billionaires, CEOs in the finance sector, the managerial class generally, together with a coalition of minorities, especially Blacks and Hispanics.
According to the author, this has implications for the geographical spread of the respective support bases, which cannot be reduced to city versus country but a more complicated picture, between Democrat dominated downtowns, including in "red" (GOP dominated) states where inner-city elites can turn to the federal government or the courts to seek redress against conservative state governments.
The author does not consider recent evidence of a fracturing in the Democratic coalition, particularly as it concerns Hispanics, exemplified by the recent election for the governorship of Virginia, where the Republican candidate won the Hispanic vote by nine percent, and recent ballots in border counties of Texas where Republicans won with massive swings in formerly safe Democrat areas.
Excerpts Read the article Discuss the article View in graph
Ignore maps that show electoral results by state and look at county maps or maps of U.S. House districts. At this level of granularity, state borders disappear. There are no red states or blue states. Instead, there are blue urban cores floating in a sea of red. Even the exurbs and rural areas in blue states like California and New York tend to be overwhelmingly red and Republican.
This is not a difference between “city” and “country.” Hardly any Americans live or work on farms or ranches anymore. The big divide is within metro areas, between the blue downtowns and their inner-ring suburbs that are home to the American oligarchy and its children and retainers, and the red exurbs; outer-ring suburbs tend to be battlegrounds between the Democratic and Republican coalitions. This geographic concentration hurts the Democrats in the Senate and the Electoral College. At the same time, Democratic blue core cities in majority red states can often circumvent state governments by appealing directly to Congress and to the enforcement layers of the federal bureaucracy and judiciary, as well as to the media and corporate elites controlled by the national party.
The Democratic coalition is an hourglass, top-heavy and bottom-heavy with a narrow middle. In addition to hoovering up the votes of college-educated Americans, the Democrats are the party of the Big Rich—tech billionaires and CEOs, investment banking houses, and the managerial class that spans large corporate enterprises and aligned prestige federal agencies like the Justice Department and the national security agencies. This mostly white and Asian American group cannot win elections without the overwhelming support of Black Americans, and smaller majorities of Hispanic and Asian American voters, clustered in the downtowns and inner suburbs. The high cost of living in Democratic hub cities forces out the multiracial middle; the exceptions tend to be civil servants like police and first responders and teachers who can (sometimes) afford to live in or near their downtown jobs.