This study shows why Midwest suburbs are pivotal for a Biden victory

A new study from a Democratic think tank shows just how dramatically the party’s voter coalition in the Midwest shifted from rural to suburban voters over the last decade.

And it underscores how Joe Biden will need to rack up votes in different parts of the key battleground states in the region than past Democratic presidential nominees if he hopes to defeat President Donald Trump this fall.

Third Way, a center-left think tank, published a new study Friday tracking how much geographically smaller — in terms of square miles — Democratic-held House seats in the Midwest are now compared to a decade earlier.

The difference is dramatic: In 2008, thanks to holding a host of rural seats that cover a lot of sparsely populated land, the average midwestern Democratic district was 7,749 square miles, about equal to the average Republican district in the region.

But after the 2018 midterms, an election that saw Democrats sweep to a House majority, the party’s average seat in the Midwest shrank to just 2,731 square miles. The GOP’s average seat, meanwhile, swelled to 11,875 square miles, the study showed.

The shift in district size was emblematic of a party that had lost support among many white working-class voters in rural areas, but gained support among white suburban voters, many of whom are college-educated — a change that predates Trump but has accelerated during his presidency.

“This trend of shrinking blue districts offers yet another indication that Democrats should look to geography as a way to understand the changing party coalition in the Midwest (and elsewhere in the country),” wrote Third Way Senior Political Analyst David de la Fuente, the study’s author.

Relative to past GOP presidential nominees, Trump has always polled poorly with white suburban voters, particularly white women with a college degree. His support with this voting bloc has shrunk even further in recent months, amid a broad dip in support linked to Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and nationwide Black Lives Matter protests.

This vulnerability is a roadmap, Third Way analysts say, to how Biden can win back states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, each of which Trump won in 2016.

“It means rebuilding the blue wall doesn’t mean remaking it with the same material,” said Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy and politics at Third Way, referencing a group of midwestern states that had backed the Democratic presidential nominee in six consecutive elections before Trump ended the streak four years ago. “What we’re really seeing is, we’re going to rebuild the blue wall with something different than what we’ve used in the past.”

This story was originally published July 10, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "This study shows why Midwest suburbs are pivotal for a Biden victory."